


memoir of 





Rnnk- . H 5 H 3 



PRESENTED BY 



Incites Al^^t 

Ma*-' 




Benjamin Francis Hayes at about Thirty- 
Two Years of Age. 



A MEMOIR of 




With Brief Extracfts from 
His Writings 



By EDWARD CARY HAYES 




The Morning Star Publishing House 
Boston, 1907 






ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 






fl*M/HvM»,-o 6#"&C#w*~* 






to tlj* memory nf oor fatter, lett^amttt Franrfa I?ajj*a» 

and aofcreaaefr to t|ta poatmtg, ifta frtettoa, ano 

to any mho mag bertttp aattafartton or 

inspiration from tlje ronton- 

plattnn of a aeratr 

and useful life. 



"He was, in a great and noble way, the most 
unique man that I ever knew." 

—President George Colby Chase 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

ANCESTRY 9 

CHAPTER II. 
The Youth .._-..- 20 

CHAPTER III. 
The Teacher - - - - - - - 28 

CHAPTER IV. 
A Helpmate --_.... 47 

CHAPTER V. 
Closing Days of Life - 67 

CHAPTER VI. 
Letters - - - - - 87 

CHAPTER VII. 
An Appreciation of Professor Hayes - - 111 

CHAPTER VIII. 
A Sermon on "The Life to Come." 129 



A MEMOIR OF 

BENJAMIN FRANCIS HAYES 



CHAPTER I. 

ANCESTRY. 

John Hayes, grandfather of Benjamin 
Francis Hayes, was born at Barrington, New 
Hampshire. He was one of a family of eight 
children, and was left fatherless when nine 
years of age. Subsequently he was appren- 
ticed to his uncle in the adjoining town of 
Dover. When John was fourteen years old 
his uncle was drafted for the Continental 
Army, to serve in the war of the Revolution. 
The uncle had a sick wife whom he was loath 
to leave, and the fourteen-year-old apprentice 
was eager to take his place. Unwilling to send 
to war one so young, and his own nephew, the 
uncle rode day and night through the country- 
side seeking a substitute, but the able-bodied 
men, who had not special cause to remain at 
home, had been drafted or had volunteered. 

9 



A Memoir of 

Neither love nor money could secure a sub- 
stitute, and late in the night before the morn- 
ing when he must appear in person or by sub- 
stitute at the rendezvous, the uncle called in 
a choking voice from the foot of the stairs, 
"John, you'll have to go." John went, and 
reached Saratoga in time to be present at the 
surrender of Burgoyne. One of the Continen- 
tals at whose feet a British soldier laid down 
his musket was the lad of fourteen years. But 
the size of the boy prevented any absurdity in 
the spectacle. John's stature, when full 
grown, was two inches above six feet. 

In the army John contracted smallpox and 
was discharged; but his spirit of adventure 
was not satisfied, and with return of health 
he enlisted as a privateer, sailing out of Ports- 
mouth, New Hampshire. He served thus for 
nearly two years, and among the grandsire 
tales young Benjamin Francis heard were 
stories of the sea, racy with Scotch phrases and 
sailor terms. One was the story of a battle 
with a British cruiser; how both antagonists 
maneuvered long for a berth to windward, and 
how the Yankee craft and men out-sailed the 
man-'o-war, and how grandfather at his 

10 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

loaded gun would wait for the British ship to 
roll to leeward on a, heavy sea, and then hit 
her below the water line. John Hayes was 
one of the few sailors of that time who would 
have no grog. 

The war over, he returned to Dover, finish- 
ing his apprenticeship, married Mary Hanson 
of that place, and settled as tanner and shoe- 
maker at Windham, Maine. Many clergymen 
of the "standing order" remitted their salaries 
in whole or in part during the hard times of 
the war, but after the war was over they de- 
manded their back pay. John Hayes arrived 
at Windham in time to bear a share of this 
burden. Having a desire for more land, and 
having acquired ability to gratify it, he moved 
from Windham to New Gloucester, Maine, and 
purchased three contiguous parcels of land 
with eighty acres in all. One of the houses 
on this land he turned into his shop. He 
reached New Gloucester in time to encounter 
the demand of the parson at that place for his 
back pay. This double experience of heavy 
payment to an "established" church may or 
may not be one reason why he did not remain 
a Congregationalism 

11 



A Memoir of 

One certain cause for the change in his 
church affiliation was the visit to New 
Gloucester of the famous Methodist pioneer, 
Jesse Lee. At the time of this visit, John 
Hayes had become one of the officials of the 
local church of the Standing Order, which, 
having no pastor at the time, was holding no 
services. When the officer who had the church 
key refused to open the door, that the visiting 
minister might preach the gospel in a house 
dedicated to the worship of God instead of in 
the open field, John Hayes took his ax and 
broke down the door, and so admitted the min- 
ister and the throng who wished to hear him. 
His Scotch blood would not brook forfeiture, 
in the new country, of the principles for which 
the covenanters had fought, and see an estab- 
lished church exclude from the privileges of 
the gospel all who did not offer it in the name 
of the favored sect. He was afterward a class- 
leader in the new connection. 

John had seven children, one of whom died 
at seventeen, and all the rest grew to maturity. 
Jesse, the youngest of these, born June 2, 1797, 
was the father of Benjamin Francis Hayes, 
the subject of this memoir. From the time 

12 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

he was fourteen years old, according to the in- 
dustrious customs of the period, Jesse took 
his place among the workers in the shop and 
on the farm, and thereafter did not enjoy two 
weeks' continuous schooling until he was "out 
of his time." Jesse had a hungering mind, 
and as soon as he was twenty-one he began to 
go to school, working at home only enough to 
earn his board; and presently, having by this 
time become an "extra fine shoemaker," he 
went to Paris, Maine, to practice that craft in 
order to earn money for a liberal education. 

But Jesse was the favorite son. His older 
brothers had scattered upon their several 
careers, and the old folks at home urged him, 
for filial love and duty, to return to them. They 
did not appreciate his ambition, and he was 
too conscientious and generous a youth to in- 
sist upon the claims of his own future. He 
returned and lived at home for seven years. 
All those years the passion for learning and a 
larger life smouldered and burned. At the end 
of that time, hoping thereby to realize these 
hopes, Jesse relinquished his claim to the home 
property to his mother's relative, George Han- 
son, and a new house was built on the place 

13 



A Memoir of 

for the Hansons. But, for some unknown 
reason, the arrangement did not hold. The 
Hansons wished to return to their former 
home, and "the old folks" pined for Jesse. 
With tears they besought him to return, and 
with tears he consented. 

Soon after Jesse yielded thus to what he 
thought his duty to his parents, and settled 
down once more at the home in New Glouces- 
ter, he married Mary Harmon, daughter of 
Daniel Harmon, of Durham. She became the 
mother of Benjamin Francis Hayes. 

Daniel Harmon, whose father, of the same 
name, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War, 
was himself a soldier in the War of 1812. 
When seventy years of age, weighing more 
than two hundred pounds, he still could lead 
the pace at the forenoon's mowing, and, as 
he said, "Had never been so sick that a good 
dish of pork and beans wouldn't cure him." 
He had shrewd, practical sense, together with 
jovial wit and humor. His grandson has said, 
"I never could afford to get far behind him 
in the field, for, if I did, I was sure to lose 
something good in his talk." Once a rogue 
robbed his cellar after a porker had been 

14 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

killed; Daniel charged his own family not to 
mention the fact to any one. Next March 
town-meeting day a man said to him : "By the 
way, Squire Harmon, did you ever find out 
who stole the meat out of your cellar last 
winter?" "Never till this moment/' was the 
reply. Like John Hayes, Daniel Harmon was 
for twenty years a Methodist class-leader. He 
was a representative in the State legislature 
and a trial justice, and was in elective politi- 
cal office for at least twenty years consecu- 
tively. 

Mary Harmon, born September 25, 1802, 
was the second among seven children, five 
sons and two daughters, of whom all but one 
grew to maturity, the daughters marrying well 
and the sons achieving eminent respectability 
as professional and business men in various 
cities. At the death of the wife of Daniel 
Harmon, Mary became the housemother. The 
two youngest brothers had playful quarrels 
as to which should have the cheek with the 
dimple in it, of their comely sister-mother. 
"A daughter of Squire Harmon with those 
eyes doesn't need any examination" — this is 
what the supervisor of schools in Falmouth 

15 



A Memoir of 

said when she presented herself as a candidate 
for a position as teacher. Mary filled her 
place as the feminine head of the large house- 
hold, not only with fidelity and loving good- 
will, but also with thrift and executive dis- 
patch. She was a person of "f orehandedness" 
and energy. When at the age of eighty-five 
she broke her hip and for two years was con- 
fined to her chair, she required to be kept 
supplied with handiwork, the current periodi- 
cals, and now and then a learned book ; for, as 
she said shortly after the accident: "I can't 
afford to be wasting my precious time." She 
had a liking for humorous allusions, a gift of 
insight, and a talent for repartee. She was 
a kind and sweet-tempered, but forceful and 
active old lady, deeply religious, and with 
a live interest in the affairs of the world. 
Gentlemen visiting New England from "the 
West" used sometimes to call to express ap- 
preciation of an earlier acquaintance with her, 
and gratitude for the uplift of her influence 
when they were young. Many have testified 
that she was rare and strong in character 
and in ability; and my own memory confirms 
the tradition of the kindness of her heart, 

16 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

the spice of her talk, and the marked personal 
impression she produced. 

After Jesse Hayes and Mary Harmon were 
married and settled at New Gloucester, five 
children were born to them. Benjamin 
Francis, the oldest, was born March 28, 1830. 
"Francis" (as throughout manhood he was 
called by those with the right to use a given 
name) has told me how tenderly and pro- 
foundly his father and mother loved each 
other. 

Jesse Hayes, though he had so largely 
sacrificed his aspirations, was licensed by the 
Methodists as a preacher. Later, having been 
ordained by the Free Baptists, he was for two 
years pastor of the Poland and Danville Free 
Baptist Church, at South Auburn. Benjamin 
Francis, just before his death, told me that he 
still retained a strong impression of one of his 
father's sermons on, "The Responsibility of 
Parents for Children," and that he recalled 
the declaration of one of the leading men of 
the community, "Brother Hayes is my favorite 
preacher." It is said that Jesse was a man 
who greatly undervalued his own ability. It 
may be that his notion of filial duty made him 

17 



A Memoir of 

rob the kingdom of Christ, which he longed to 
serve, of more than he ever guessed. He was 
a man, as his son testified, who, as long as he 
lived, was always learning, increasing both in 
intellectual stores and in moral insight ; whose 
character commanded his son's profound re- 
spect, and, it might be added, his pride. 

Jesse early resolved that if his son, Francis, 
developed scholarly tastes they should not be 
thwarted as his own had been. By the time 
Francis was seventeen years old he had ac- 
quired all the town schools could give, and had 
been away from home for three short fall 
terms. Then Jesse moved to Auburn and 
bought a large house, that is still standing, 
close by the Edward Little High School, an 
institution which at that time was known as 
the Lewiston Falls Academy. 

Soon after moving to this new home, Jesse, 
in partnership with another man, opened a 
store. The business flourished until Jesse 
objected to certain practices of his partner 
which he regarded as tricky. The reply he 
received was, "I've come here to make money ; 
and Pm going to make money." Thereupon 
the partnership was dissolved. Not long after, 

18 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

Jesse Hayes was made county treasurer of 
Androscoggin County, of which Auburn is the 
county-seat, and he was re-elected to this office. 
While he was treasurer there was a large issue 
of county bonds, and the present county 
buildings were erected. During these years 
also Francis finished his fit for college and 
took the college course at Bowdoin, where he 
was graduated in the class of 1855. 



19 



A Memoir of 



CHAPTER II. 

THE YOUTH. 

During his college course Francis taught 
a term of school each year, and I have known 
of at least one distinguished man who owed 
his awakening to that young teacher. These 
absences from college made it necessary for 
him to "make up" about one-third of his col- 
lege course. This fact, together with the ten- 
dency to honest self -depreciation which he had 
inherited, made it a half surprise to him to 
be designated among the honor men of his 
class, and chosen a member of $ B K His 
undergraduate fraternity was V T. Among 
his fellow students he won the same "respect 
and love" — to use a class-mate's expression — 
as in after years. 

Professor Thomas 0. Upham was in those 
days the Nestor of New England "Mental 
and Moral Philosophy," and author of the 
standard text-books on those subjects. As 
a student, Francis so commended himself 
to Dr. Upham that later the old professor be- 

20 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

queathed the copyrights of his text-books to 
the young scholar, with the task of such revi- 
sion as might be desirable to keep them up to 
date. Mr. Hayes accepted no income from 
these copyrights until after the decease of Mrs. 
Uphain, but as long as she survived, had all 
the money paid to her. 

Not long before Francis Hayes graduated 
from Lewiston Falls Academy, there appeared 
among the young lady students at that insti- 
tution, one with an erect and well-rounded 
figure, and cheeks like those of the girl who, 
overhearing a young man exclaim, "By 
heaven, she's painted !" retorted, "And by 
heaven only," whose bearing betrayed a pride 
half at variance with the demure expression 
of her face, lighted by large, blue-gray eyes. 
It required no second look to make the observ- 
er aware that she was "some one in par- 
ticular." 

This was Miss Arcy Cary, born August 6, 
1827, one of the thirteen children of Francis 
Cary, of Turner. Her mother, Sallie Phillips, 
born February 3, 1790, was of the same family 
with Phillips Brooks, Wendell Phillips and 
the founders of Phillips Exeter and Phillips 

21 



A Memoir of 

Andover. The first Cary 1 in her father's line 
in this country was John, an Oxford graduate 
and the first teacher of Latin at Plymouth 
Colony, which he joined about 1630. John 
Alden and Priscilla Molliens (so spelled in 
the Cary family record) were ancestors of 
Arcy Cary, whose line of descent from them in- 
cluded Mary Adams, of the John Adams 
family. Her maternal grandfather, still a mere 
lad, followed his father and two brothers in- 
to the army of the Revolution, and was an 



^Descended from de Karry of William the Conqueror's Dooms- 
day Book, through. Mary Boleyn, wife of Sir William Cary, a 
sister of Queen Elizabeth's mother. The modern spelling dates 
back to Edward the First's time. Burke's Heraldry contains the 
following : "In the reign of Henry V., a certain knight errant 
of Aragon, having passed through divers countries and per- 
formed many feats of arms to his high commendation, arrived 
here in England, where he challenged any man of his rank and 
quality to make trial of his valor and skill at arms. This chal- 
lenge Sir Robert Cary accepted, between whom a cruel encounter 
and doubtful combat was waged in Smithfield, London. But at 
length this noble champion vanquished the presumptuous Ar- 
agonois, for which Henry V. restored unto him a good part of 
his father's lands, of which for his loyalty to Richard II. he 
had been deprived by Henry IV., and authorized him to wear 
the arms of the Knight of Aragon, which the noble posterity 
continue to wear unto this day." 

According to the poem, "Virtute Excerptae," by Rev. Otis Carey, 
the Spaniard had remained victorious in six days of justing, 
and then proclaimed that he would fight one more combat, a 
Voutrance, and if victorious, claim to have vanquished Eng- 
land's chivalry, as he had already that of Austria, France, and 
Italy. And after more than one day had passed without a 
response, because the foremost English knights were already 
overthrown and disqualified, Sir Robert Cary petitioned to be 
restored to knighthood for a single day, in order that he might 
meet the Knight of Aragon. The forfeited arms of the chal- 
lenge bore three roses symbolizing his triumphs in Austria, 
France, and Italy, which Sir Robert was commanded to wear, 
with the Latin motto, "Plucked by valor." 

This Sir Robert Cary married a lady descended from King 
Edward I. and his queen Eleanor, daughter of Ferdinand III. 
of Castile. 

22 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

Orderly in the boat with Washington when he 
crossed the Delaware at the battle of Trenton. 
The Carys came from 2 Bridgewater, Mass., 
to Turner, Maine. Not long after their arrival 
a high-school was established in Turner, the 
first in any town of its class in Maine. A pub- 
lic library was also established, and for several 
years was kept in Squire Cary's house. He also 
built, largely at his own charges, a Congrega- 
tional meeting-house in Turner, which after- 
wards burned down. 

In the acquaintance that followed between 
Francis Hayes and Miss Gary, it appeared 
that they had a common bond in their zeal 
for education and in their religious experience. 
In the family where the young man grew up, 
God was as constantly recognized, deferred 
to, and revered as if he had been a visible in- 
mate of the home. Jesse Hayes and his wife, 
Mary, thought their thoughts and made their 

2 The original grant of Duxbury and Bridgwater, called by the 
Indians, Satucket, was made in 1639 by Ousamequin, afterwards 
called "Massasoit," sachem of the Pockonocket Indians, to Cap- 
tain Miles Standish, Samuel Nash, and Constant Southworth, 
as trustees, in behalf of Wm. Bradford, John Cary, and fifty-two 
others named. The consideration mentioned in the deed was 
"seven coats, a yard and a half in a coat ; nine hatchets, eight 
hoes, twenty knives, four moose skins, and ten and a half yards 
of cotton." The tract purchased included fourteen miles square, 
which was divided among fifty-four people. John Carey's share 
was one mile wide by seven miles long, lying north and south 
from the northern boundary of the town. 

23 



A Memoir of 

plans from what they conceived to be the 
point of view of their Divine Friend. Francis 
had chosen to walk in the way of his parents ; 
he had formed religious habits similar to 
theirs, and was looking forward to service in 
the Christian ministry. Miss Cary's parents 
were also thoroughly religious, and she herself 
had had a religious experience remarkable 
for its depth and intensity. This young man 
and woman found themselves at one in their 
faith, in their aspirations for personal devel- 
opment, and in their plans for service. 

Upon graduating from Bowdoin, Francis 
Hayes entered the theological seminary at New 
Hampton, New Hampshire; at the same time 
Miss Gary, then his fiance, entered the liter- 
ary institution associated with it. During his 
course in the theological seminary he earned 
at first three hundred and later four hundred 
dollars a year by devoting a portion of his 
time to teaching in the literary institution. 
After one year Miss Cary graduated, and 
thereupon she also became a teacher in the 
literary institution. Before going to New 
Hjampton she had given abundant proof of her 
power as a teacher, and the character of her 

24 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

service in that institution soon secured her 
an invitation to become its Lady Principal. 
When both had thus become teachers, they 
were married, August 12, 1856. 

Mr. Hayes had planned, after completing 
his work at the theological seminary, to take 
a year's graduate work in New York. 
But there were four churches, those pulpits 
he had occupied within his last year at 
New Hampton, each of which desired him 
to become its pastor. One of these was in 
Olneyville, then a suburb of Providence, 
Rhode Island, now a part of that city. Here 
the opportunities for both growth and use- 
fulness were such that the plan of continuing 
student life was abandoned, and he entered 
at once upon the pastorate. He had completed 
the work required for graduation from the 
seminary the previous June, but lingered to 
remove what to him seemed deficiencies, caused 
by the fact that throughout the three years 
of his seminary course half of his time had 
been given to teaching. Accordingly it was 
early spring when the requirements of the new 
pastorate took him to Rhode Island. 

Deacon Dyer received the young pastor and 

25 



A Memoir of 

his wife. The Deacon was owner of extensive 
nurseries and an ardent beauty-lover, and the 
view that extended before his house was one to 
satisfy the soul. The newly-arrived pair had 
just left behind them the snows of northern 
New England; in Rhode Island spring was in 
the fresh glory of her awakening. As the young 
wife stepped from the carriage before the 
Deacon's home and looked across the wide ex- 
panse of beautiful grounds, she exclaimed, 
"Why, this is Paradise !" I have heard the ex- 
perience recounted by her and also by her 
husband since her death. I never knew an- 
other woman so ravished by the beauty of 
flowers as she. Her face would gather into 
a pucker of intense delight at the sight of a 
peculiarly sweet blossom or of a mass of 
flowers. She liked to isolate and dwell upon 
a single flower. At the same time I never 
saw one appear to be more inspired by 
the beauty of an entire landscape, especially 
of a wide prospect. Oary Hill, where she 
was born, commands an extensive outlook. 
Many a time when driving upon the undu- 
lating roads of Maine, the view from the 
crest of a hill wxmld lift her into a kind of 

26 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

transport. Mr. Hayes was also a great lover 
of flowers, and an enthusiastic botanist. When- 
ever he drove outside the town, save in winter, 
it was his custom to stop frequently to gather 
plants and flowers, and he usually brought 
home a carriage load. I remember sitting with 
him on a log, after a long walk, when he in- 
terrupted our talk on a quite different sub- 
ject, by saying abruptly, "There are seven 
varieties of ferns about us here," and proceed- 
ing to name them. I doubt whether any man 
in Maine was more thoroughly acquainted with 
the plants that grow out of its soil. Though 
botany was his special enthusiasm, he loved 
all "out-of-doors" with both aesthetic response 
and intellectual interest and curiosity. 

Of the Olneyville pastorate I cannot say 
much; it ended long before my birth. Some 
letters give evidence of the respect and love 
he won there, and he was sufficiently remem- 
bered so that at his death, forty-three years 
later, the Providence Journal recalled his con- 
nection with the city, and published an ap- 
preciative account of his life. 



27 



A Memoir of 



CHAPTER III. 

THE TEACHER. 

The Olneyville pastorate was his only one. 
It continued four years and three months. 
At the end of that time Mr. and Mrs. Hayes 
were called to become Principal and Precep- 
tress of Lapham Institute, a Free Baptist edu- 
cational institution at North Scituate, Rhode 
Island. The appointment was urged as an im- 
portant matter of denominational policy, and 
was accepted. After this position had been 
filled for two years, Mr. Hayes was called to 
a professorship in Bates College. 

At the funeral of Professor Hayes, Presi- 
dent Chase, of Bates, spoke on "The Relation 
of Dr. Hayes to Bates College." He said : "We 
who were students at that time were much in- 
terested in the new professor, and I remember 
well my first view of him. A group of students 
were standing in front of one of the college 
buildings when one said, 'There comes the new 
professor/ I looked and saw a tall man, moving 

28 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

rapidly, with head somewhat thrown back, 
and by his bearing, by his dress, which was 
refined, and by his face, I felt assured that the 
trustees of the young college had made no 
mistake in the choice of this man. From his 
eyes of clear intelligence, and his face of kind- 
ness, I received a distinct impression of the 
man, which has never altered." 

In conversation, about the time of the death 
of Professor Hayes, President Chase said to 
me: "In all our matters of discipline, your 
father was always a man of perfect courage 
and, at the same time, of great kindness; in- 
deed his unfailing kindness was perhaps his 
most marked characteristic. a Only once did 
he seem to the rest of us to be perhaps unduly 
severe; and in that case we all found out, 
soon after, that the man we were dealing with 
was probably the wickedest one we ever had 
here." 

Professor Hayes was one with whom "it 
never took any courage" to do what he thought 
was right. It was a matter of course. He was 
without selfassertiveness, but he liked to ven- 
ture something. Even as an old man he en- 

1 His wife used often to say, "Your father is a hind man." 

29 



A Memoir of 

joyed climbing in perilous places, and this 
venturesome, pioneering disposition, I suspect, 
had something to do with the freedom with 
which he moved in intellectual regions from 
which many ministers and theologians of his 
generation felt themselves warned away. 

The official bulletin of Bates College pub- 
lished May 15, 1906, contained the following: 

"Professor Benjamin Francis Hayes has 
been to all, save the most recent graduates, 
one of the best known and most beloved of 
their Bates teachers. He came to Bates College 
in August 1865. He was a professor in the 
college proper, in distinction from the the- 
ological school, from that date till 1894, from 
which time he was employed wholly in Cobb 
Divinity School. His versatility and breadth 
of scholarship appeared in the record of his 
work as a teacher. From 1865 to 1869 he was 
Professor of Modern Languages and from 1869 
to 1873, of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. 
In 1873 he added to the duties of the chair 
last named those of Professor of Exegetical 
Theology in Cobb Divinity School. Yet even 
this statement meagerly indicates the wealth 
of his learning. He was an enthusiastic stu- 

30 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

dent and teacher of Botany, and during the 
earlier years of the College, like his associ- 
ates, he was often called upon and found ready 
to teach studies as remote from his special 
work as mathematics and Latin. He had both 
the scientific and the literary tastes. All his 
life he was a practical student both of Botany 
and of Geology. 

"Bates never had a kinder or more sympa- 
thetic teacher. Students seriously ill, in the 
days when Lewiston had no general hospital, 
in repeated instances found a home, with most 
loving and tender care from both Professor 
and Mrs. Hayes, during many painful weeks. 
* * * * His satisfactions were those of the soul. 
Although he enjoyed the good and beautiful 
things of the world, — his home, his family, 
his friends, nature, the birds and flowers, the 
sunrise and sunset, — he saw in them more than 
mere objects, the present work of God." 

Probably the most crowded part of his 
career was the period of twenty-one years, from 
1873 to 1894, when he was Professor of Mental 
and Moral Philosophy in the College, gave in- 
struction in Botany during a part of each 
year by a method that consumed much time 

31 






A Memoir of 



in the field and at the microscope, and also 
filled the chair of Exegetical Theology in Cobb 
Divinity School. The divinity school, though 
connected with the college, occupied a separate 
building, and, with the exception of Professor 
Hayes, had a separate faculty. When in 1894 
his whole time became devoted to work in the 
Divinity School, the department of New Tes- 
tament Exegesis, which he had maintained, 
was assigned to Professor Anthony, and Pro- 
fessor Hayes assumed the chair of Apologet- 
ics and Pastoral Care. His work in Apologet- 
ics and the Philosophy of Religion, during this 
last period of his teaching, involved the whole 
problem of adjustment of theological concep- 
tions to the advancement of historical and crit- 
ical knowledge and the progress of philo- 
sophic thought; and he made himself as con- 
versant with the problems of Old Testament 
history and criticism as his previous work 
had required him to be with those of New 
Testament interpretation. 

President Chase has expressed the judg- 
ment — and gives permission to quote it here 
— that "as a scholar, Professor Hayes was 
distinctly first among all that have ever been 

32 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

connected with Bates." He adds: "Although 
students tried sometimes to annoy their teach- 
ers, finding a flaw in the teacher's knowledge 
of the subject was a method no one ever 
thought of trying with him." Great as was the 
range of subjects in which he was, at one time 
or another, called upon to give instruction, 
there is strong testimony, from students and 
from colleagues, that whatever subject he 
taught, he imparted the feeling that he was a 
master in it. Professor Anthony has expressed 
the judgment that he had learning in each of 
several departments that would do credit to 
one who spent his life as a specialist in that 
single field. There was a gusto and momen- 
tum, like his gait, in the way he attacked a 
subject, and the sweep of it took in each sub- 
script and accent. Some of his associates have 
speculated as to what distinction this un- 
daunted and unwearied thoroughness would 
have achieved if, instead of being subdivided 
as it was, his life as professor could have been 
spent in a single department of study — the 
more as this quality was accompanied by the 
fertility of mind in fresh suggestions which 
characterizes the thinker, as distinguished 

33 



A Memoir of 



from the mere scholar and patient investiga- 
tor. 

He never would treat college students as 
children needing country-school discipline ; 
and especially by the less serious among them 
he was often more highly appreciated in 
their maturer years, after graduation, than 
while they were still in his classes. The ex- 
clamation, "Ah! he was an inspired man!" 
which was quoted at his funeral as having 
come from the lips of one of his old college 
students, upon hearing of his death, may or 
may not have been uttered by one who lacked 
full appreciation in the classroom; but cer- 
tain it is that this teacher was of the kind that 
succeeds best with graduate students who 
have already been initiated in the elements 
of the subject taught, and can be held 
by intellectual interest to follow abstruse 
discussion. He spent his force upon the 
subject rather than upon the situation in 
the classroom. This method did not at all 
diminish his success as a teacher in the 
Divinity School, to which his later years were 
entirely devoted. 

At this point should be mentioned one char- 

34 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

acteristic of his intellectual life which could 
not be omitted from this sketch without for- 
feiting the hope of giving a truthful impression 
of the man, and that is the progressiveness of 
his thought. His doctrine never petrified, his 
own position and view never became a thing 
to be defended against further reconstruction. 
The toil of readjusting his conceptions to new 
knowledge was never too great; he did not 
flinch from it. On the contrary, he was always 
in eager quest of new light and of completer 
adjustment of his views to the objective real- 
ity. It may be that in the intellectual history 
of mankind there never (has been another 
period, of equal length, in which this trait was 
so subtly put to the test as it was during 
the last forty years, while he was a teacher in 
Bates College and Cobb Divinity School, and 
it is peculiarly noteworthy that a theological 
professor of mature age, in such conservative 
environment, with the deepest appreciation of 
religious values, met the test so well. His con- 
tinual interest in the newest books, even dur- 
ing the last months of his life, was such that 
one of his colleagues in the faculty of the 
Divinity School remarked, after his decease, 

35 



A Memoir of 



"There is no man left in Lewiston now to whom 
one can go as one could to him for information 
about the latest books." I chanced to be visit- 
ing him at the time when Wildeboer's Old 
Testament Theology had just appeared in a 
German translation from the Dutch, and 
remember in particular the zest with which 
he was reading it. Every new book that he 
opened he read in a hospitable spirit, hoping 
among its pages to find something new and 
illuminating. 

The intellectual and ethical quality implied 
in this trait were reinforced by general zest- 
fulness and strength of interest. How much 
one lives depends upon how much one is inter- 
ested. He retained an unflagging youthf ulness 
of interest in all interesting things, especially 
intellectual interest and curiosity. He would 
stoop and linger like a boy to examine a lizard 
or a curious insect. Mention has been made al- 
ready of his interest in Botany. On one occa- 
sion when he was to join me by taking a fifteen- 
mile stage ride, soon after starting he became 
so much interested in the geological forma- 
tions along the way that he leaped out, told 
the stage-driver to drive on, and made the 

36 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

journey on foot. He was in his sixties when 
he took that tramp of more than twelve miles. 
I have known him to enjoy both coasting and 
skating after he was well in the seventies. 

Although his w T as a busy pen, and not a 
little of his writing was published in one form 
or another, he never produced such a book as 
we had hoped. This was due largely to the 
fact that his life was scattered by the necessity 
of teaching in so many departments. In spite 
of this he might perhaps have contrived to put 
into more permanent and adequate expression 
the fruit of his study and insight, if he had 
perfectly organized his ceaseless industry, pro- 
viding he had ever been willing to call any- 
thing finished. But whenever he lectured to 
a class upon a subject that had been covered 
by the lectures of the previous year, he wanted 
to rewrite and improve the course in the light 
of his most recent thought and study. Conse- 
quently he did not lay aside extensive stores 
of finished matter ready for the irrevocable 
permanence of type. The production never be- 
came an end in itself; he was always in pur- 
suit of a further view into the truth and a 
more adequate presentation of it. I am con- 

37 



A Memoir of 

fident that no sermon or lecture was ever de- 
livered by him twice alike. His manuscripts 
were overlaid with a fresh deposit every time 
he used them. As often as he returned to a 
subject, it appeared in new phases and aspects. 
The fecundity of his mind responded to the 
theme again and again with fresh suggestions. 
He quoted with full appreciation the saying 
of Lessing, to the effect that the search for 
truth is a life experience more to be prized 
than mere knowing without the application 
of knowledge to further advance. Whatever 
he worked on was always alive and in process. 
All his works, as one fitly said of him, must be 
inscribed as were the Grecian statues of the 
age of Pericles, not in the aorist, but in the 
imperfect tense: not "Phidias made it," but 
"Phidias was making this." 1 

His long service as professor at Bates had 
one interruption. He was given leave of ab- 
sence for the collegiate year 1873-74, and he 
spent the college year, together with most of 
the summer vacations of '73 and '74, in Europe. 
He took with him his entire family — his wife, 



1 Laokoon by Lessing, Bohn edition, p. 158, quoting Pliny. 

38 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

the two sons, Francis and Edward, and the 
daughter Elisabeth. The university year, of 
eight months, was spent at the University of 
Halle, on the Saale, in Prussian Saxony, the 
remainder of the time in travel in Scotland, 
England, and on the Continent. The profes- 
sors at Halle who particularly attracted him 
were Ulrici, the psychologist and philosopher, 
and Tholuck, then the most famous of German 
theologians, and Primate of the Prussian Es- 
tablished Church. (Oberconsistorialrath.) 

With Doctor and Mrs. Tholuck (who was 
born the Baroness von Gemmingen-Steinegg) 
Doctor and Mrs. Hayes formed a strong and 
lasting friendship, and correspondence was 
maintained for twenty years after returning 
to America, until the death of both Professor 
and Mrs. Tholuck. A similar lasting friend- 
ship was formed with the family of von 
Mebuhr. 1 



*As a memento of this friendship, there is preserved in the 
family of Doctor Hayes a Latin copy of St. Augustine's "City 
of God," printed three years before Columbus discovered Amer- 
ica. It was formerly the property of von Niebuhr the histor- 
ian, whose epoch-making work not only contributed largely to 
the knowledge of Roman history, but also was a chief factor in 
establishing the modern conception of the methods of histori- 
cal criticism. The marginal notes written in the book (accord- 
ing to his grandson) are by the hand of the historian. The 
historian bequeathed the book to his son, who was von Bis- 
marck's predecessor as Prime Minister of the King of Prussia. 
The Prime Minister bequeathed the book to his son, Judge Ger- 
hart von Niebuhr, who presented it to Mr. and Mrs. Hayes. 

39 



A Memoir of 

During the year 1877-78, while Doctor Oren 
Burbank Cheney, president of Bates College, 
was absent in Europe, Doctor Hayes was act- 
ing president. 

The degree of Doctor of Divinity was con- 
ferred upon Professor Hayes in 1871 by Hills- 
dale College. The trustees of Hillsdale College 
also solicited him to become president of that 
institution. 

Throughout his residence in Lewiston other 
activities than those of his professorship 
claimed a share of his energy. He attended 
political caucuses and discharged the duties 
of a citizen. He was interested in the phil- 
anthropic movements of the community. Acts 
of personal kindness to the lonely or unfor- 
tunate were gratefully reported after his 
death. "He has called on me every week for 
the two years since your mother died," said 
his wife's aged and invalid sister who lived in 
Auburn. He was beneficently active in the 
local church and Sunday school, and he 
participated in the activities of the general 
organizations of the denomination to which 
he belonged. He was repeatedly a delegate to 
the triennial General Conference of the denom- 

40 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

ination, and preached the annual sermon be- 
fore that body on the occasion of the celebra- 
tion of the hundredth anniversary of the 
denomination's birth. He was at one time or 
another a member of the general boards of 
Foreign Missions, of Home Missions, of 
Education, and one of the corporators of the 
denominational publishing house. He was 
fertile in projects. Ocean Park and the An- 
nual New England Assembly of Free Baptists 
owe their existence to his initiative. The cot- 
tage which he built at Ocean Park was for 
many years the summer resort of his family. 
He preached frequently, either upon special 
occasions or in pulpits from which the pastors 
were temporarily absent. His public prayers 
were genuine prayers and unusually fervent 
and uplifting. In preaching, what is called 
"striving for effect/' was utterly absent; in- 
deed, it was inconceivable in connection with 
him. He stood in perfect freedom from him- 
self, a man of unconscious courage, tall, erect, 
speaking with force and fluency in a rich, 
masculine voice, that did not desert him to 
the end of life. The last time he attended 
church, when he had hardly strength enough 

41 



A Memoir of 

to go up the steps leading to the audience 
room, it was communion Sunday, and, in con- 
nection with the ordinance, he delivered an 
address that stirred the congregation pro- 
foundly. After he had taken permanently to 
his bed, word came to him that a student, upon 
the motive evoked by that address, had begun 
a life of Christian service. His sermons were 
delivered with great earnestness, they were 
lighted from time to time by new and exceed- 
ingly apt illustrations, and were the fresh 
deliverances of a sincere and earnest intel- 
ligence teeming with matter. Some fresh as- 
pect of truth that had fed his own soul seemed 
always to be calling for utterance. 

As years went by and his thought pro- 
gressed, there was change in the mode of his 
religious experience. From youth he was em- 
inently a man of faith, forming exalted con- 
ceptions of the relation between God and men, 
and carrying out these conceptions to their 
logical application to practical affairs. He be- 
longed to a generation which acquired a new 
view of the method of God's working, as the 
orderly procedure of the Power that is im- 
manent and operative in all the processes of 

42 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

nature, and he learned to think of that power 
not as a too man-like being, irregularly acting 
upon the universe, but as the essence of all 
being, continuously acting within it, as the 
Spirit, "in whom we live and move and have 
our being." Accordingly, he ceased to speak 
as if God required to be reminded of his 
children or of their needs, and prayed, not 
to increase God's thoughtfulness of him, but 
in order to increase his own thoughtfulness 
of God; not that God might be disposed 
to do greater good to him, or to others 
for whom he prayed, but that he himself might 
be disposed to completer cooperation with the 
divine good- will. He prayed because he hun- 
gered for heavenly fellowship, rejoiced in the 
contemplation of God, and in the expression 
of gratitude, of devotion, and of those desires 
and purposes, both for individual life and 
work, and for the kingdom of God upon earth, 
which, as he believed, can be shared with the 
head of that kingdom by its subjects. 

In this brief sketch I have stated simply 
the most essential facts of a man's life and 
character. The quality of the effect which he 
produced in the various relations of life is 

43 



A Memoir of 

indicated by others in letters quoted later. I 
have set forth his shortcomings as well as his 
excellencies. Some failure to organize his 
manifold activities with watchful regard for 
the flight of time, some ignoring of the boyish 
limitations of undergraduates — these, I think, 
are the most serious faults that any one can 
mention in connection with him. 

Bare enumeration of the most evident qual- 
ities of his intellectual life requires mention 
of his gift of lucid and forceful expression; 
his unflinching thoroughness that could find 
no apology, and wished for none, to omit or 
slight anything that pertained to the subject 
in hand; his zestful interest in everything to 
which he applied himself ; his openness of mind 
which, to the last, welcomed new light and the 
labor of readjustment; his clear and strong 
rationality, and the fertility and suggestive- 
ness of his mind. The opinion has been re- 
peatedly expressed by those whose judgment 
in such a matter is of weight — and I doubt if 
any one who knew him would dissent from it 
— that if at any time he had been transferred 
to a place among scholars where strict special- 
ization invites great achievement in particu- 

44 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

lar fields, he would have taken high rank 
among them. None need regret that he had a 
place among the teachers who made for Bates 
College the first half century of her history, 
even though the position he held among them 
as a scholar, and the work he did, are evidence 
that, with the opportunity of strict special- 
ization and the environment which accom- 
panies it, important contribution to produc- 
tive scholarship could with confidence have 
been expected of him. 

Beneath and above his intellectual life the 
essential and unmistakable facts of his char- 
acter were these : Kind he always was, genuine 
and simple and dignified he always was, with 
no empty assumption of the mere manner of 
dignity. Though not incapable of indignation, 
he seemed to have reached the point where 
there ceases to be danger of lapses into un- 
seemly speech or unmagnanimous feeling. To 
be of service was his main desire. The Chris- 
tian ideal was the background of his thoughts, 
sentiments, aims, and conduct, and as long 
ago as any of his children can remember, 
through the habitual sense of loyal companion- 
ship with a divine associate in whom that ideal 

45 



A Memoir of 

is realized, conformity to that standard ap- 
peared to have become with him a simple 
matter of course. 



46 




Mrs. Hayes. 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 



CHAPTER IV. 

A HELPMATE. 

The twilight of life's day began when the 
physicians announced to Doctor Hayes that a 
disease had fastened itself upon his wife which 
must soon terminate her life. It was rather a 
golden sunset so long as she lingered, for 
these two had no fear of the future that lies 
beyond, though he might dread the separa- 
tion here, and they rejoiced in "the dear to- 
getherness" till its last hour, then only did 
twilight fall ; and even then it was not a star- 
less night, but twilight with an after-glow, for 
after her decease the thought of her was so 
much and so vividly present with him that he 
seemed to himself, as he often said, to enjoy 
her spiritual companionship ; and it was more 
to him, I believe, than the companionship of 
any visible friend. Marriage had meant much 
to the parents of these two. The father of Mrs. 
Hayes, after his wife's death, being appar- 
ently well, though aged, said to his children, 

47 



A Memoir of 

"I do not think that I shall remain long be- 
hind your mother/' and a week later died 
as he sat in his chair. The mother of 
Professor Hayes survived her husband by more 
than twenty years, but as she lay speechless 
in the exhaustion of death, her last act was to 
open her eyes and point, smiling joyously, to 
the portrait, hanging on the wall, of her hus- 
band, whom she hoped presently to rejoin. 
There are as many degrees in marriage as in 
Masonry, and Professor and Mrs. Hayes were 
married in the thirty-third degree. 

An attempt to convey, in few words, a notion 
of the character and personality of Mrs. Hayes 
should begin by referring to her religious 
experience. This daughter of the Puritans 
from girlhood had an exacting conscience. 
Nightly she reviewed the day, and whatever 
her conscience disapproved, she confessed in 
prayer, asking forgiveness, sometimes with 
tears ; and often she retired to rest happy in 
the conviction that she was approved. But 
before she was sixteen she came under the 
domination of a theology which, in that day, 
overshadowed some souls with life-long mel- 
ancholy and blighted some with hard indif- 

48 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

f erence. If the weekly teachings of her parson 
were the truth then her scrupulous self-exam- 
ination and her satisfaction in the sense that 
God forgave the errors which she confessed, 
and accepted her conscientious endeavor to do 
his will, were but the filthy rags of self -right- 
eousness. If God was good, as she firmly be- 
lieved, and yet was angry with her every day, 
and every act of her unregenerate soul was 
sin, as each Sunday she was assured, with 
ponderous argument, then must her guilt 
be dire. That she might realize the hor- 
ror of her supposed condition, and feel the 
necessary agony for her own sins and for the 
guilt of depravity which she was believed to 
have inherited, she studied all the awakening 
and alarming books to be secured, wrestling 
in prayer with strong crying and tears. Mean- 
while the unflinching Calvinist in the pulpit 
proclaimed that as the farmer goes to the 
woods and selects some trees to be cut down 
for his winter's fire and allows some to stand 
and flourish, so God, of his sovereign will, 
selects some men to flourish in eternal life, 
and some he reprobates for everlasting dam- 
nation, according to the ill-deserts which they 

49 



A Memoir of 

have inherited from Adam — all for his own 
eternal glory. For years she strove in vain, 
and in distress of spirit, to secure the ap- 
proved relations with this awful potentate, 
until convinced that she could do no more, 
that if she was reprobate she was reprobate, 
that her utmost of repentance, submission, and 
petition had been offered, and that it was use- 
less for her to ask again. Then deliberately 
she resolved, "I can pray no more, but I will 
kneel before him in silent acknowledgment 
of his goodness." And as thus she knelt, her 
spirit was filled with revelation. The hard 
teachings that had troubled her youth were 
superceded by a diviner insight. Them came 
to her, as if by a prophet's inspiration, the 
vision of a brother Christ and of a father God. 
The austere potentate who, for his own glory, 
reprobates to eternal torment millions of his 
creatures, was replaced by the great Kinsman 
of every loving spirit, yearning to be under- 
stood and loved by his children. To the God 
she so conceived her soul responded with re- 
verence and devotion, and never from that 
hour did she doubt Christ's thought of God, 
which had become the vision of her own soul. 

50 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

This experience gave her singular prepara- 
tion to exert religious influence and to intro- 
duce others to the fellowship of Christ by a 
more normal way. 

True to the appreciations fostered in her 
home, she had an early enthusiasm for educa- 
tion, accompanied by a determination that did 
not wane when the annual sessions of the local 
school were over. Through a part of her later 
girlhood, after the school had closed for the 
year, she regularly used in study a period of 
morning quiet before the early hour at which 
the rest of the family were astir, and when 
friends who spent this portion of the year at 
boarding-school returned they found her still 
abreast with them. When nineteen years of 
age she was solicited to make her first attempt 
at teaching, by taking charge of the Turner 
Village school, of ninety pupils. Her success 
was such that she received, through the agent, 
a request from every family in her native dis- 
trict to teach the school in which she had 
been a pupil the preceding winter, and which 
was attended by some of her friends who were 
older than herself. In those days village and 
rural schools were attended by pupils of ma- 

51 



A Memoir of 

ture age, problems of discipline were difficult, 
and any but a male teacher for a winter school 
had been unheard of, yet she was repeatedly 
sought at man's pay for winter terms where 
men had failed. In the presence of her kind- 
ness and idealism and the unfailing grace and 
dignity that were her birthright, problems of 
discipline gave place to universal affection. 
The payment of her salary, at the close of one 
of her terms, came to her as a surprise, so com- 
pletely had she forgotten that she was doing 
the work for anything but love of it and her 
pupils. One winter she declined a larger sal- 
ary in order to go to a frontier town where 
there had been no good school. Here young 
men who had idled away their winters with- 
out learning so much as the rudiments of 
arithmetic, though in combination they had 
driven more than one master from the school- 
house, were transformed into eager, self- 
respecting pupils, using not alone the school- 
hours, but recesses, mornings and evenings 
in study. The first Sunday after the opening 
of this school she formed a Sunday school. 
Before the term ended money had been sub- 
scribed, a preacher engaged, and regular Sab- 

52 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

bath services established in the town. She 
taught the village schools at South Paris and 
at Harrison, and was both teacher and pupil 
at the Oxford Normal Institute. When she 
was appointed to a place in the faculty at New 
Hampton it was no experiment, for her teach- 
er in the subject regarded as the most difficult 
in the curriculum at New Hampton said that 
no recitation of hers in that course had re- 
ceived any mark but the highest; she held 
a certificate from a general examination of 
candidates for teachers, at which her papers 
had ranked far above all others, and her pre- 
vious experience as a teacher was both a prep- 
aration and a guarantee. The veteran edu- 
cator who, as chairman of the examining 
committee, followed her work, term by term, 
the three years during which she taught at 
New Hampton, declared her "the best teacher 
of Latin that he ever knew." Later as Pre- 
ceptress of Lapham Institute in Rhode Island, 
while her husband was Principal, she aroused 
enthusiasm as a teacher of Latin and of 
English literature. It is of some interest that 
among those who were her pupils were more 
than half a dozen who became professors in 

53 



A Memoir of 

colleges and universities, including Yale and 
Cornell, besides a United States senator, and 
several judges. 

Scores of letters contain grateful testimony 
concerning the helpful Christian influence 
which she everywhere exerted. Dr. Richards 
Colwell, professor in Denison University, 
who, forty years before, had been one of the 
students at Lapham Institute, said in a letter 
written shortly after her death : "I have never 
ceased to be grateful for the way in which she 
led me along into the service of Christ. She 
set me right in more ways than I can enumer- 
ate, and often when a student comes to me with 
difficulties, I remember what Mrs. Hayes said 
to me, and I repeat it to him as the best thing 
I can say ... I have been in the habit each 
year of speaking of her in my classes." Dr. 
W. T. Hewett, professor in Cornell Univer- 
sity, writes : "Of all my teachers, three linger 
in my memory with especial gratitude, and one 
of these became Mrs. Hayes. I have never 
ceased to retain the memory of the sweetness 
and beauty of her influence upon me in boy- 
hood." A graduate of Bates, a man of exalted 
character and wide influence, once a neigh- 

54 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

bor but now residing in the West, writes : "I 
never knew one who impressed me as living 
so near her Heavenly Father." A gentleman, 
once a fellow-teacher with Mrs. Hayes, whose 
intimacy with her family has continued to the 
present, said : "I never knew any other person 
who gave herself so unreservedly to the inter- 
ests of others." Miss Ella M. Butts, at one 
time Lady Principal at New Hampton, now 
for years a missionary in India, writing of the 
"beautiful and helpful lives" lived by her and 
her husband, calls them "the saintliest, most 
Christlike lives I have ever known." 

When Professor and Mrs. Hayes moved to 
Lewiston they purchased a house of ample 
space, near the college, on grounds which they 
liberally planted with shrubs and trees, facing 
the street for one hundred and fifty feet, 
situated upon an eminence commanding a 
prospect of fifty miles of the hills, valleys, 
and mountains of Maine and New Hampshire. 
This home was altogether untroubled by that 
form of vulgarity which consists in the wish 
to appear to have expended money. It had 
standards of its own. Books and periodicals 
and accumulations of gifts and of mementos 

55 



A Memoir of 

of travel made it a place of livable, lovable 
atmosphere. An abundant hospitality, es- 
pecially during the first twenty-five or thirty 
years, helped to make it a center of helpful- 
ness. This hospitality included the sick and 
the stranger, and was exercised always for 
helpfulness or for friendship. 

The children of this home received the bene- 
fit of their mother's powers of instruction and 
inspiration. Save for one year, the writer had 
no other teacher until ten years of age, and 
remembers that she used a number of the 
methods that have since come to be advocated 
by educational leaders; for example, sending 
the child on "nature study" excursions to 
gather, it might be, as many different leaves 
as possible to be drawn on returning home, 
teaching the technical names of their forms 
and explaining the etymology of those terms ; 
introducing the child to ancient mythology; 
causing him to write out what he had seen, 
heard, or imagined; beginning the study of 
a foreign language at a very early age; and 
having the pupil read his Latin with com- 
prehension without translating into English. 

For nearly forty years Mrs. Hayes taught a 

56 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

class in the "Main Street" Sunday school in 
Lewiston. During its earlier years the mem- 
bership of this class changed frequently, be- 
cause it was made up largely of young wom- 
en who were employed for the time in Lewis- 
ton, but had homes in other towns. These 
young women entered the church singly and 
in groups, and scarcely any one ever belonged 
to this class of hers without becoming a Chris- 
tian. And for those already Christians it was 
a school of Christian nurture and enlighten- 
ment during all these years, and certainly 
could have been no less so when afterward her 
husband became its teacher. 

In 1873 the calls from the India mission 
field were pathetically urgent, and the re- 
sources elicited in response were discourag- 
ingly inadequate. While communing with God 
in secret prayer, a plan unfolded itself to her 
for relieving this situation. The work thus 
outlined in her mind was entered upon at once. 
Every mail bore letters, as many as she could 
write between mails, to influential women, to 
pastors, editors, officers of the home and for- 
eign missionary societies, and heads of insti- 
tutions of learning. Those living in distant 

57 



A Memoir of 

western States were asked to telegraph re- 
plies authorizing the use of their names in 
calling a convention. The New Hampshire 
"Yearly Meeting" of Free Baptists was shortly 
to occur. As a result of this correspondence a 
call, signed by names representing all local- 
ities, was issued summoning a convention at 
the time and place of that meeting. It was in 
June of seventy-three, and Mrs. Hayes and her 
husband went in their carriage across the hill 
country to Sandwich, New Hampshire, where 
the meeting was held. There, after the hard- 
est week's work of her life, she saw the Free 
Baptist Woman's Missionary Society organ- 
ized, its constitution unanimously adopted, 
its offices filled by sympathetic and enthusias- 
tic ladies, new life imparted to a cause that 
had been languishing, and the work of reliev- 
ing the necessities of the mission actually be- 
gun. This was the origin of the general 
Woman's Missionary Society of the Free Bap- 
tist denomination. 

At the same time while this agitation for a 
general organization was going on, interviews 
were sought with the pastors of her own and 
the two neighboring churches, and with many 

58 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

ladies in these parishes, which resulted in the 
formation on a single evening, of three local 
societies to be auxiliary to the general woman's 
missionary society when it should be organ- 
ized. At the same time, also, correspondence 
was held with ladies in various "quarterly 
meetings" 1 that were to convene during the 
summer months, arranging for a missionary 
meeting at each quarterly session, and also 
for the formation of local auxiliary societies 
in the churches within these quarterly meet- 
ings. She also secured the organization of 
children's auxiliaries in certain churches, and 
so directed the activities of the children's 
mission band in her own church that its con- 
tribution rose as high as four hundred dollars 
in a year. 

About six years after inaugurating the mis- 
sionary activities above described, Mrs. Hayes 
presented to ladies of her own community a 
plan for a society to aid the women and girls, 
of whom seven thousand were then already 
employed in the factories of Lewiston, amid 
perils and limitations of opportunity. 

The first practical activity of this society 

x The name used by Free Baptists for a minor ecclesiastical 
district, as well as for its convention. 

59 



A Memoir of 

had been suggested by the predicament of a 
domestic in her own home, who was about to 
be married, and who, though an efficient cook, 
could not make or even repair a simple gar- 
ment. Hundreds of little girls, with mothers 
employed in the factories of Lewiston, were 
growing up in equal ignorance of domestic 
arts, and in their turn would become wives 
and mothers of homes condemned by their 
ignorance to otherwise unnecessary thriftless- 
ness and poverty, causes of both misery and 
vice. This suggested to her mind the establish- 
ment of an industrial school for girls. Such a 
school was successfully maintained for a num- 
ber of years. Its enrollment reached three 
hundred ; and it was a center of cultural in- 
fluences, in addition to the direct instruction. 
The society which she founded established 
a large free evening school, and maintained 
it until it was taken over by the city as a part 
of the public school system. The same organ- 
ization of ladies secured the appointment of 
a police matron, and supplied the funds for 
her support until this office had so proved its 
usefulness as to be regularly maintained by 
the city. The society also conducted, on the 

60 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

chief business street of the city, a free reading- 
room, a library, and a sewing and recreation 
room for girls. Later it purchased a fine resi- 
dence facing the city park, and opened it as a 
young women's home. Here, at moderate ex- 
pense, a haven could be found by those who, 
to prevent breakdown, must have a period of 
rest, and by convalescents coming from the 
hospital. Here also there was provided a tem- 
porary home for girls arriving in the city in 
search of work, who otherwise would not sel- 
dom have been out of money before finding 
employment, and frequently would have been 
surrounded not only by serious discomforts, 
but also by far more serious perils. At the 
home there was an employment bureau, and 
it became the center of all the other activities 
maintained by the society, including Sunday 
religious meetings, classes in cooking, nurs- 
ing, dress-making, millinery, etc., and clubs 
for social pleasure and improvement. After 
her death this institution received the name of 
"The Hayes Home," and its work is still effi- 
ciently carried on. For these undertakings she 
raised thousands of dollars largely by her per- 
sonal correspondence. At the back of her busy 

61 



A Memoir of 

desk, on a clipping yellowed by time, hung 
these verse® of Ella Wheeler Wilcox : 

Let me to-day do something that shall take 

A little sadness from the world's vast store, 
And may I be so favored as to make 

Of joys too scanty sum a little more. 
Let me not hurt by any selfish deed 

Or thoughtless word the heart of foe or friend; 
Nor would I pass unseeing worthy need, 

Or sin by silence where I should defend. 

For the twenty-four years preceding her 
decease she was president of the society just 
described, which in the interval had become 
the Women's Christian Association of Lewis- 
ton. It was founded in 1880, and was one of 
the earliest of the original beginnings of such 
work. 1 She not only furnished the initiative 
to which it owed its existence, but she was also 
the main guiding force of its successful expan- 
sion and development; a development, how- 
ever, which would have been impossible had 
not rare coadjutors become identified with 
her in its promotion. 

An essential of her usefulness was her self- 
withdrawing delicacy, coupled with dignity. 

1 The first working girls' clubs (founded, however, not by work- 
ing girls, but under leadership similar to that which originated 
the movement in Lewiston) were formed in 1879 ; and were 
Miss Eliza Turner's "New Century Club," of Philadelphia, and 
Miss Grace H. Dodge's "Thirty-eighth Street Club," of New York. 
It has been stated that the introduction of working girls' clubs 
into New England came as late as the decade of the nineties. — 
The International Cyclopedia, vol. 17, p. 480, and Bliss' En- 
cyclopedia of Social Reform, p. 1421. 

62 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

I think if safe to say that no one ever sus- 
pected her of proposing any plan for the sake 
of widening her own sphere or increasing her 
own importance. On the contrary, she never 
ceased to have a deprecatory feeling that pub- 
licity, when necessary, was a necessary evil; 
and when some one standing beside her death- 
bed adapting Paul's pean, said, "Henceforth 
there is laid up for you a crown," she answered 
with sudden emphasis, "I don't want a crown." 
While in all her public activities she was 
without self-assertion, she had serenity and 
poise, because she trusted her own refined in- 
stincts and her own clear judgments. She 
had also, in a note-worthy degree, that indis- 
pensable trait of the finest womanhood, dis- 
criminating and eager appreciation of what 
is beautiful in art, literature, and life. These 
traits gave her a social quality which insured 
her the cooperation of choice spirits, and was 
an important element in the practical leader- 
ship which she exercised. None who knew her 
need be assured that in the friendships, which 
survived the separation of a score of years, 
with the wife of the Primate of the Prussian 
Church, and of Bismarck's predecessor as 

63 



A Memoir of 

Prime Minister, she was quite as much the 
sought as the seeker, nor that their rank and 
title in the monarchy would not have sufficed 
to attract her to those ladies, who were noble 
women, not merely by the accident of titled 
ancestry, but by virtue of the rare quality of 
their beautiful personalities. 

While that which she achieved in youth and 
in maturity evinced intellectual powers, of no 
mean order, yet her endowment in this re- 
spect was not so unusual as that possessed 
by her husband. She had, however, another 
quality possibly as exceptional in its degree — 
the practical dynamics of individuality. She 
had no great temperamental physical courage, 
and her manner was the exact opposite of all 
explosiveness ; but she was powerfully moved 
to action of her quiet sort, by her own judg- 
ments. People differ greatly in the voltage gen- 
erated in them by an accepted idea; and it 
was in this, not the heat, but the steady pro- 
pulsion of her beliefs that she was exceptional. 
This was a cause of the intense mental con- 
centration with which she thought, worked, 
and wrote, of the long protracted religious 
struggle of her early years, and the habit of 

64 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

rising to study an hour before the family was 
astir; and it was the most eminent factor in 
what she accomplished. Her moral judgments 
were in an unusual degree sincere, idealistic, 
and dominant. To her an idea was never 
merely something to be contemplated with 
more or less approval; it was already the 
beginning of conduct. "This ought to be" 
meant "this shall be," not because it was "her 
way," but because she believed it was "God's 
way." She made her plans upon her knees, 
and did not doubt that in promoting what 
was good she worked together with God. 
She had the courage, as well as the determina- 
tion to act upon her own deliberate judgment 
concerning what ought to be done and what 
could be done, notwithstanding the fears and 
opposition of whoever might dissuade. Her 
determination was not spasmodic, but lasted 
as long as the conviction that a course should 
be pursued, so that she had a sweet and quiet 
persistence that melted down barriers, and 
did not flinch though the obstacles might never 
lessen, but only change as years went by. 

For forty-eight years these two shared not 
only their visible experiences, but also their 

65 



A Memoir of 

inner life. They read together and discussed 
many of the books that were causing the 
world of thought to move forward, and in- 
timately shared a progressive religious ex- 
perience. The tendency to shape beliefs ac- 
cording to her own souPs needs was somewhat 
stronger in her, and the tendency to be domi- 
nated by the considerations of reason some- 
what stronger in him. Yet she did not lack the 
latter quality, and through the transforma- 
tions of thought that characterized active in- 
telligence in the last half century, they went 
side by side. For each, the conception that 
life has its main significance as an opportu- 
nity to serve in promoting the kingdom of 
Christ on earth, was not only a proposition 
which commanded assent, but also the habit- 
ual motive of their lives, which dominated 
every other. Their tastes, interests, and as- 
pirations were in harmony. The worth of 
each to the other was beyond all estimate. 

Mrs. Hayes passed away on the twenty- 
second of January, 1904, aged seventy-six. No 
traveler ever set out on a long journey more 
calmly or with fuller consent of mind. 



66 




Mrs. Hayes at Sixty-Eight Years of Age. 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 



CHAPTER V. 

CLOSING DAYS OF LIFE. 

The disease that took the life of Doctor 
Hayes was probably contracted by contagion 
during the winter of 1903. In the following 
summer he tramped the grounds of the St. 
Louis Exposition with footsteps from which 
his wonted elasticity and endurance were 
measurably abated. During that summer he 
paid his last visit to the homes of his children 
in Kansas, Ohio, and New York. Throughout 
the ensuing year he carried on his work of 
teaching, studying, and writing, with constant 
industry, although he felt and said that his 
energies were "slowing down." In the spring 
of 1905 he had begun to suffer from discom- 
fort and distension of the abdomen, which he 
attributed to indigestion, but which were 
really due to abdominal cancer and its drop- 
sical effects. The following winter he sub- 
mitted to more thorough medical examina- 
tions, both in Lewiston and in Portland. These 

67 



A Memoir of 

examinations disclosed the real character of 
his disease. On December 12, he received the 
verdict of the family physician, together with 
the confirmatory diagnosis which had been 
forwarded from Portland. It informed him 
that the close of life was at hand. 

The correspondence with his family, which 
followed, is almost too intimate for publica- 
tion, but some extracts from it afford the only 
adequate record of the spirit in which he ap- 
proached the close of his life. The following 
is from a letter written two days after the 
report of the physicians : 

"My precious and honored son and daugh- 
ter, Frank and Cora : — Out of a loving heart, 
all the heart which the Lord through ancestry 
and experience has given me, I wish you and 
your's a happy Christmas, and I anticipate it, 
too .... How are you, dear son, in health and 
vigor? That is a hundredfold more important 
than how I am. We have neither of us said 
much about these questions, but I should like 
to exchange confidences with you; though I 
have no good story to tell. Indications are 
that I shall no more strike an up grade, but 
thank our great Father that 'I fear no evil/ 

68 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

and hope you may all be able to congratulate 
me when my promotion comes. I deserve more 
of the opposite than congratulation for the 
past — but poor scholars do graduate, because 
our Father is not done with us when we are 
through here. Oh, the thought of the society 
and the service beyond at times thrills me with 
anticipation. ' Shouldn't I be disappointed/ 
said your mother, 'to pass on and find there 
was nothing?' and then she laughed at her 
Hibernianism ; and so say I. 

"Gott sei mit eucli alien. Meine Liebe geht 
mi euch. "Father." 

A letter to his younger son suggested that 
as an approaching meeting of the American 
Economic Association would soon take the 
son to Baltimore, the latter might then visit 
his father in Lewiston. The apprehension oc- 
casioned by this letter led to an exchange of 
telegrams, which were followed by a letter 
dated December 17, part of which is given 
below : 

"I infer from your telegram that the Econo- 
mic Association meets after Christmas, so this 

69 



A Memoir of 



letter will reach you, and the circular also, 
which I may begin as soon as I close this. 1 



"When I wrote you I had just turned a cor- 
ner in my knowledge, by learning that I need 
not expect any turn in my road physically 
from the direction in which I had been going 
since last July. The revelation caused no 
alarm, and more joy than sadness, but it made 
me want to see you and be enveloped for a 
little in the warmth of your love with no 
hundreds of miles of atmosphere between. It 
has been very pleasant, since you spoke of it, 
to think of spending part of the summer in 
the warm bosom of your family, and still is, 
but as to the reality of that, we know not what 
the summer will reveal. I may spend our 
fiftieth anniversary with my Allie, as we long 
expected to do. This has been a delightful 
thought, often coming to my mind as, for ex- 
ample, when I read in 'The Thought of God/ 
'In Twos/ 1st series, p. 107/ " 



*It was our custom to write circular letters which started 
from one home and went to each of the three others that made 
up our family circle. 



2 Poems by Frederick L. Hosmer and William C. Gannett. 

70 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

The "circular" letter, written the same day 
as the preceding, was as follows : 

Lewiston, Maine, December 17, 1905. 

"My Dear Children : — I thank our Heaven- 
ly Father for you and for all the influence 
that goes out from each of your lives. I do 
not murmur that Providence has located you 
so far from the old home and from each other, 
delightful as it would be to us all if without 
other change distance could be annihilated so 
that we could often see and talk with each 
other. .... I am happy in thinking of and 
loving you, happy in thought of how exempt 
we and ours have all been from that sorrow 
that is hardest to bear, worse than bereave- 
ment, the sorrow for loved ones gone wrong; 
and happy in the belief that in the wisdom 
that guards and guides in all your homes they 
will in future be spared that sorrow ; and may 
we all be able so to take into our thought the 
whole of existence, both that passed here in 
discipline and service, and that beyond where 
we shall display the results of discipline, that 
we may find each case of promotion an oc- 
casion for unselfish joy and congratulation." 

Here follows a detailed account of his de- 

71 



A Memoir of 



oline in health, and of his examination by the 
council of physicians who reported their 
diagnosis by letter. He continues: 

••Well, the doctor's letter seemed to be final 

I accepted it as such. Of course I thought of 
my children and their dear families. I thought 
of niv classes and niv colleagues who would 
be perplexed as well as burdened to take my 
work. Then I considered that that which 
would remain after a few weeks more would 
not be so perplexing to them as that which 
we have had thus far — we are nearly through 
the philosophy. Aside from these considera- 
tions I do not know as I had one regret for 
nivself . It would not agree with the testimony 
of history nor with that of my personal life 
if there were not better life and more joyous 
service beyond. Of course the thought of pain 
and lassitude intermediate had often occurred, 
but it is not my habit to cross bridges till I 
come to them, and I have dismissed the 
thought with *I will fear no evil/ and with a 
prayer that my patience might not fail. 

••When I retired to my room that night — 
Tuesday, the 12th — the thought that there 
would be for me no long period of useless 

72 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

weakness was rather pleasant, and I said to 
myself: 'If it were made known to me that 
I had been granted a year's leave of absence 
with a ticket for a voyage around the world 
to explore Japan, China, India, Egypt, and the 
Holy Land, should I not expect to be con- 
gratulated, and would I not gladly risk weeks 
of continued sea-sickness for the sake of all 
that is to be enjoyed and learned in such a 
voyage? But what is all that compared with 
the privilege of exploring the spirit world, of 
resuming study there with Allie, as we have 
anticipated when together, of knowing our 
Lord as we are known and finding what it is 
to be like him in the associations and the 
service for which all the discipline of this life 
is a preparation?' I assure you I have not for 
many and many a night lain down more cheer- 
ful or happier, and I am accustomed to lie 
down happy and to awake with cheerful hope. 
"Of course I often think of the sweet as- 
sociations with all of you, and of the interest 
and beauty that would fill life for me here, 
were I to stay in health, and work — as I did 
to-day when looking over beautiful water- 
colors in Plummer's Studio and when riding 

73 



A Memoir of 

with Professor Anthony — but then at once I 
say that beauty, society, and love are not 
limited to material and planetary boundaries ; 
our Father who loves them and provides them 
here surely provides them for the spirit world 
as well, and as spirit is more real and more 
important than matter, that for the spirit 
world must be adapted to every spiritual ca- 
pacity and need. So I think it is not boasting 
ta say, 'Thanks be unto God who giveth us 
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,' 
It is he who brought life and immortality to 
light. I think with pity of those who lived and 
died before him, and of the millions who are in 
that dimness still. I was never more inter- 
ested in all work that scatters the light. I 
look back with some regrets to opportunities 
that were not used, to work that was almost 
possible^ but not quite; but it was not essen- 
tial, the world's work will go on, and for 
what will be for me hereafter I can trust him 
who doeth all things w r ell. 

"It would be no surprise to me if the end 
should come sooner than the doctor thinks. 
The expectation at present is that I shall carry 
on my classes next term. My expectation is, 

74 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

and has been for years that I should not stay 
long after strength to care for myself is gone, 
and of course it is pleasant to have that an- 
ticipation. ***** 

"There, I have tried to give you a frank and 
full account of the situation. What it implies 
for me and my estate and you and your fam- 
ilies has often been in my mind in months 
gone by, and I hope it will find none of us 
unprepared and all of us sure that if soon my 
'Good-by 'till morning' shall be said to you all, 
that will not only be best for me, but best 
for you all. 

"And if some of you should think next sum- 
mer, 'We hoped to have father with us now/ 
you can add, 'How glad we may be that father 
and mother are together on their fiftieth an- 
niversary, as for many years they hoped to be/ 

"Please pass this around ; it goes laden with 
the warm love of my heart for each father 
and mother and child in your precious and 
love-lighted homes. 

"Father and Grandpa." 

Soon after the writing of this letter came 
the visit of his younger son; following that 
came his daughter Elizabeth, with her daugh- 

75 



A Memoir of 

ter Gertrude, then the older son from Topeka, 
the son-in-law, and finally the return of the 
younger son, so that all these were with him 
during the last days of physical decline. 

Professor Hayes continued his regular la- 
bors, attended church, and taught his class in 
Sunday school up to the extreme limit of his 
strength. A class of divinity students came 
regularly to the house until about two weeks 
before the end. Although the weakness and 
lassitude had become so great that he lay most 
of the day motionless, with closed eyes, yet he 
would thoroughly arouse himself during the 
class period ; and for a short time, nearly every 
day, he dictated and listened to the reading 
of selected passages, in preparation for his 
class. 

The wasting of the disease was such that 
finally his muscles were apparently gone, 
and during the last week he was not able 
to place his arms, but required one of us to put 
even his hands in comfortable positions. He 
was watched constantly by his children, so- 
licitous to meet the rise of every need or wish. 
During those days, when the flesh w r as almost 
utterly wasted away, his iiiind remained 

76 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

unclouded and his voice clear and resonant. 
The family physician, Dr. Herbert 0. Brad- 
ford, said that in all his experience (and his 
experience had been very long) he scarcely re- 
called a case in which the mind had so retained 
its powers in spite of such extreme decline of 
the body. It seemed as if the least expenditure 
of vigor sufficed to set in motion the delicately- 
adjusted mechanism of the mind. On the last 
Wednesday of his life he finished dictating the 
following article, which was published in the 
Lewiston Journal of March 8 ; and on the next 
day he dictated an important and tactfully- 
worded letter. It was as he lay in the ex- 
treme of emaciation and weakness that he 
unclosed his eyes and dictated the following, 
which was written down as it came from his 
lips; and the emendation that if afterwards 
received was confined to slight changes in two 
sentences. Dean Howe had expressed the wish 
that an answer from Professor Hayes, to the 
question with which the article opens, might 
be published. 

THE LAST PUBLIC UTTERANCE. 

"You have asked me to state, if I can do so 
from experience, whether the transition from 

77 



A Memoir of 

the traditional theology to acceptance of the 
views made necessary by recent progress of 
science; and to the changed conceptions of 
the nature, mode of construction, purpose, and 
inspiration of the Scriptures which has re- 
sulted from the critical study of them ; and to 
the world-view that has been gained by the 
progressive construction of philosophy, are 
necessarily detrimental to faith in God, devo- 
tion to Christ, and zeal for salvation of men. 
"I think I can answer from experience, for 
both my inclinations from early life, and es- 
pecially my obligations as theological teacher 
in recent years, have made it my duty to study 
and estimate the effects of recent thought 
upon the traditional religious beliefs, and 
therefore to accept those which have been 
wrought out and established upon a satisfac- 
tory basis for faith. And I can confidently say 
that the effect of this process has been large 
increase of faith and joy in the Lord, increased 
satisfaction and delight in the Holy Scriptures, 
together with enlarged interest and earnest- 
ness to carry a knowledge of the gospel to all 
men everywhere in order to bring them into 
filial relations to the Heavenly Father. 

78 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

"I have observed, too, a like tendency in 
other minds. 

Among many letters that have brought con- 
solation and cheer to my sick-bed, all more or 
less similar in tenor, one from the beloved 
pastor of a prosperous church, contains the 
following : 

" 'I have said again and again, both in 
private and in public, that you have been the 
one above all others who has unsettled and 
then resettled my faith on a different basis and 
truer. * * * * The influence of your life, upon 
me at least, has been in an intellectual way to 
show me that honest and kindly analysis is 
not irreverent destruction, and that the true 
basis of faith is not even touched by most of 
the points of theological warfare in scholastic 
circles. At least this is the way it appeals to 
me, and as a result of the one-time wilderness 
that you led me into and out of, I can con- 
scientiously say that the decision one way or 
the other of many of the mooted points of dis- 
cussion does not affect my faith in the mission, 
message, and claim of the Son of God in this 
world or the next/ 

79 



A Memoir of 

"Personally I am now at the crucial point. 
One may get on while in health and engrossed 
in the world's affairs, with traditionary and 
indefinite beliefs about his relations to God 
and the hereafter ; he may be content to hold, 
unexamined, what those around him have re- 
ceived ; but when face to face with the narrow 
stream and the great unknown, it becomes a 
momentous question — Will my faith hold? 

"I realize that the re-examination of the 
grounds and substance of Christian faith, 
during the past ten years, has not weakened 
but greatly confirmed that faith. That exam- 
ination has resulted, indeed, in the dropping 
of some opinions which seem to have no ra- 
tional foundation, and in the modifying of 
others. It has resulted, also, in a confirmation 
of faith resting upon added evidence from 
many sources, especially upon the discovery 
that Christianity consists not in the decrees 
of councils of ancient ages, or necessarily in 
traditions handed down to us by the church, 
Catholic or Protestant — not in something 
from outside of us, but an experience within 
us, an experience of loyal sonship to the 
Eternal Father, 'revealed and realized through 

80 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

Jesus Christ/ revealed and realized also in 
the brotherhood of man — because all men are 
God's children and he lives in them. This 
gives assurance that because Jesus Christ 
lives we have also a life that parallels his, 
and a fellowship with him in service for the 
progressive establishment in this universe of 
the kingdom of the Eternal Father. 

"It by no means follows that the road into 
a tremorless faith has to be the same for 
every one. I'm but giving what is asked for, 
the testimony of personal experience that the 
acceptance of the assured results of scientific 
discovery, of critical study of the Scriptures, 
and of the reconstruction of philosophy, does 
not necessarily weaken faith in Christ and his 
gospel. 

"I can add, also, from personal knowledge, 
the experience of my wife, Mrs. A. C. Hayes. 
At her conversion she entered into a profound 
experience of love to her Heavenly Father and 
devotion to the service of Christ. She was also 
from early life much interested in theological 
and philosophical questions. Her first intro- 
duction to the question then agitating the 
religious world came through reading Presi- 

81 



A Memoir of 

dent Hitchcock's lectures on "The Religion of 
Geology," from which she learned that it was 
impossible for sane minds, who candidly ex- 
amined the testimony, to regard the early chap- 
ters of Genesis either as a historic or a scien- 
tific account of the creation. She found it to 
be a vehicle of religious instruction adapted to 
the childhood of the race, and to childhood in 
all ages. Later she came in contact with such 
theologians and students of Scripture as Pro- 
fessor Tholuck of Germany, Professor Duff, a 
lifelong student and teacher of the Old Testa- 
ment, in Airdale College, England, and Pro- 
fessor Bowne of Boston University. It is not 
easy to think that scholars of such acumen, 
such devoutness, such earnestness to know the 
truth, could be otherwise than honest and sin- 
cere, or hold views unworthy of intelligent 
Christians. She also became aware, by her own 
independent study, that inspiration belongs 
not to things, books, or words, but to men 
whom the Holy Spirit moves to speak and 
write, and that inspiration makes no finite 
being omniscient, or infallible in judgment. 
She observed that there were changes of opin- 
ion and increase of knowledge from one period 

82 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

to another of the sacred history. And it was 
a great relief thus to discover that many acts 
and statements once supposed to express the 
will of God were only human judgment re- 
specting that will, that the writers of every 
age could express themselves only in the 
thought of that age and in accordance with 
their own education. Hence, she was no longer 
obliged to find explanations and apologies to 
justify the cruelties of the judges and of 
Samuel, or for those fierce and cruel impre- 
cations in the Psalms that are plainly con- 
trary to the spirit of Christianity. 

"It became plain to her that, as we know 
from the New Testament, God tempteth not 
any man, but it was equally plain to her from 
II. Samuel 24 :1 that in the time of the writing 
of that book this was thought possible, though 
in I. Chronicles 21:1, written three hundred 
years later than Samuel, a different view 
prevailed, and Satan is affirmed to be the 
tempter. The Bible thus became to her far 
more consistent, intelligible and interesting 
upon finding that with the altered and rational 
conception of inspiration, variation in these 
minor details of ancient history would really 

83 



A Memoir of 

have nothing to do with the essentials of Chris- 
tianity, with the revelation through Christ of 
God as the universal Father, with Christ as 
the divine reconciler, and with our faith based 
upon his work, his word, and his life. More- 
over, the philosophic conception of the nature 
and immanence of God which prevails among 
modern scholars and makes the omnipresence 
of God a thinkable reality was an unfailing 
source of joy in communion, so that to her the 
words of Tennyson were no exaggeration but 
literal fact : 

"Speak thou to him for he hears, 
And spirit with spirit may meet, 
Closer to us than breathing, 
And nearer than hands and feet." 

"Thus she came to accept the theological re- 
suits of the philosophical reconstruction and 
the view of Scripture now firmly established 
in the minds of consecrated and earnest Chris- 
tian scholars in all Protestant countries. This 
transition was effected, according to her own 
testimony, without an hour's wavering of her 
faith in the Bible as communicating the es- 
sential truth to men, and in the love of the 
immanent God, the source of all truth." 

84 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

On Saturday and Sunday before the Mon- 
day morning when he died, he still wished 
occasionally to see a friend who called, and 
from time to time conversed briefly with us; 
and he joined in the family worship with in- 
telligence absolutely undimmed. He asked us 
to sing, and added; "There is an old hymn 
that I used sometimes to sing when as a pas- 
tor I visited the sick-beds of Christians, 'In 
the Christian's Home is Glory/ " We sang 
the first stanza and chorus; and then, as we 
paused, trying to recall the next, he recited 
impressively : 

"He is fitting up my mansion, 
Which eternally shall stand; 
For my stay shall not be transient, 
In that holy, happy land." 

As Sunday was dawning beautifully, he 

looked out the eastern window and said : 

"Thy love the power of thought bestowed; 
To thee my thoughts would soar: 
Thy mercy o'er my life has flowed; 
That mercy I adore." 

Sunday evening, evidently realizing the 
approach of the end, he quoted, 

"Deep down in the beautiful valley 
Where God crowns the meek and the lowly." 

85 



A Memoir of 

Later in the night his words, which had be- 
come few, showed that the thoughts were no 
longer distinct, or that the connection be- 
tween thought and speech was disarranged. 

Monday morning early, February 26, on r& 
ceiving some slight service, he said, "You are 
good boys," and he did not attempt to speak 
again. Two hours later, at a little after ten 
o'clock, he ceased to breathe, without evidence 
of suffering, and with nothing to show that 
the last breath was his last, except that no 
other came. 



86 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 



CHAPTER VI. 

LETTERS. 

The daily papers of Maine cities, and of 
other New England States, and of States be- 
yond New England, contained appreciative 
notices that day and the next. The following 
words published by one of the daily papers, 
are from an interview with Prof. James A. 
Howe, D.D., Dean of Cobb Divinity School . 
Dean Howe said : 

"A better man never lived in Lewiston than 
Professor Hayes; a truer man never lived; 
and few men are there of greater ability. 

"Professor Hayes has been an earnest 
Christian man. His Christian character was 
such a marked feature of his life that it would 
be recognized by every one as a primary trait. 

"At the same time he has been a man of pro- 
gressive thought in the study and adoption of 
religious tenets. His mind has been scholarly. 
He has been a careful investigator and con- 
scientious in every branch of study that he 

87 



A Memoir of 

pursued. That made him loyal to the truth 
as he discovered it. He was ready to welcome 
new forms of truth commended to him by 
reason and sufficient evidence. 

"He had the fearlessness of a conscientious 
man in respect to his convictions, so that he 
might depart from traditional forms of belief, 
though, in the eyes of many, they were very 
sacred, and were to him until he found reason 
for supplanting them with more solid truths. 

"His professional duties required of him an 
investigation of these themes that led him to 
take steps in advance of those whose oppor- 
tunities for such study were more limited. Yet 
no man held a more steadfast loyalty than he, 
to the fundamental principles of our evan- 
gelical faith. To that he has given testimony 
during his last sickness. 

■"As a friend and a companion, I have well 
known him since I succeeded him at the Olney- 
ville Church, and I knew him slightly before. 
He was a man of very versatile attainments. 

"He was a man of unusual ability as a plat- 
form speaker. He had the elements of elo- 
quence under his control. Under proper con- 
ditions few men could speak more interesting- 

88 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

ly, more persuasively, and more convincingly, 
than could he. He carried with his thought, 
feeling and a high sense of responsibility for 
his utterances. 

"There was something of the prophet in his 
fervor, and of the reformer in his readiness to 
advocate any righteous cause. 

"In the denomination he has been very anx- 
ious to have the standard of ministerial edu- 
cation raised to the highest possible point. He 
was the author of several useful movements in 
denominational circles, looking towards a 
better equipment of the ministry in their work. 

"When we had a Free Baptist Quarterly he 
was one of its valued contributors, and to the 
Star he has sent many a valuable contribution. 

"To these words much might be added from 
the standpoint of an appreciation of Profes- 
sor Hayes' assocation with neighbors, friends, 
and his fellow townsmen. The key-note of his 
neighborliness was gentleness and kindness, 
and the attitude of his life toward others was 
helpfulness, courtesy, and zeal for the common 
good. His appreciation of life was sane and 
generous. Neither cant nor criticism got the 
better of him. He understood humanity to the 

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A Memoir of 

measure of its better side, and was loath to 
know evil or to think evil or to consider it. A 
pure-minded, sweet, honest, faithful Christian 
gentleman was he — one who made the world 
better for his living in it, one whose loss will 
actively be felt, yet whose influence will live 
a long time in the world. 

"He has taught so many, so faithfully, and 
he has taken the purpose of youth so seriously 
that he has inspired these qualities in his 
pupils. With a mental bent towards abstract 
thought, he still kept in a remarkable degree 
his love of nature, of the material world, and 
especially of the young men under his care. 
They knew him, appreciated and loved him. 

"What better epitaph can be written of any 
man?" 

Appreciative public recognition did not wait 
until after the end had come. Previous to his 
decease, the mastery and courage, the loving 
interest in his associates, and persistent fidel- 
ity to ordinary duties with which he ap- 
proached the great transition had elicited ex- 
tended public comment, and newspaper arti- 
cles appreciative of his life and character had 
reached his bedside. 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

The following from an interview with Pro- 
fessor Jonathan Y. Stanton, the dearly loved 
and honored senior member of the Bates fa- 
culty, published three weeks before the death 
of Professor Hayes, derives special signifi- 
cance from being the utterance of one who, for 
forty years, was his colleague: 

"I cannot refrain from adding my tribute 
to Professor Hayes through the Journal. I 
have known him long and well, and my admira- 
tion has only increased as the years have roll- 
ed on. The more intimately I have known him 
the more of his sterling qualities as a Chris- 
tian gentleman I have discovered. 

"Professor Hayes is indeed a remarkable 
man. As an off-hand and extemporaneous 
speaker I have hardly ever met his equal. 
Without a moment's preparation he can talk 
on nearly any subject, and what is still bet- 
ter he can always talk well. He has a sunny 
disposition that he imparts to all with whom 
he comes in contact. His style as a teacher 
and lecturer is clear, concise, and superb. Pro- 
fessor Hayes is a man of but few equals and 
no superiors, and I love him as a brother." 

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A Memoir of 

The following, clipped from an editorial 
obituary indicates the spirit that animated 
his closing days : 

"There was none of the gloom of the sick 
room connected with his illness. He absolutely 
had no fear of death — even met it joyfully, as 
all know who have conversed with him or 
who heard his wonderful, inspired address at 
his last communion at the Main Street Free 
Baptist Church, or who have read the accounts 
of him recently published in the Lewiston 
Journal." 

At the close of the funeral, at which ad- 
dresses had been delivered by Rev. Dr. Salley, 
his pastor, by President Chase, of Bates Col- 
lege, and by Dean Howe, of Cobb Divinity 
School, one of the most influential, but least 
demonstrative citizens of the community re- 
marked: "I think I never before attended a 
funeral at which every word of appreciation 
would be so completely endorsed by every 
person present." 

The following letters are selected from 
among a much larger number of similar tenor, 
which were received by Professor Hayes after 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

the physicians had announced the near ap- 
proach of death. The first four of the letters 
quoted were from former students: 

"My Very Dear Friend: — I have only to- 
day heard of your illness, and want to send 
you at least a word of greeting to remind you 
that I, too, as well as so many others, am think- 
ing of you in these days with loving and grate- 
ful sympathy. 

"I can never forget all you have done for me, 
both in the classroom and by your example, 
and I want you to know that I have always 
found it an inspiration to look upon you and 
realize that the character I have so admired 
in you is but an example of what the Spirit 
of Christ can do for each of us. 

"I am sure it must be sweet for you to re- 
member now how many lives you have in- 
fluenced so beautifully, and how many young 
feet you have turned into the straight and 
narrow path, and set upon the firm founda- 
tion. 

"I will always remember with great glad- 
ness our meeting at Rockland, and the fact 
that you had not forgotten me. 

93 



A Memoir of 

"I trust that you will understand by these 
few simple words that from my heart I wished 
exceedingly to send you at this time some 
token of my love for, and appreciation of you, 
and to express my gladness that after the 
day's work, so gloriously done, I can know 'at 
eventide' for you it is surely 'light.' 
"Affectionately yours, 

"G. H." 

"Professor Hayes, 

"Honored and Loved Teacher and Friend : 
— I have read your letter with a strange mix- 
ture of emotion. Sorrow as I thought of your 
loss, but joy for you. Oh, your note of exulta- 
tion running through your letter thrills me 
through and through ! Yes, I do congratulate 
you, and "I thank my God for every remem- 
brance of you." In the class-room, in the home, 
in the pulpit you have been a blessing and an 
inspiration to my life, for which I am grate- 
ful. I hold in loving remembrance your ser- 
mons and helpful conversations on your last 
trip to Pittsfield. You brought me at that 
time 'Halleck's Psychology,' 'Studies of the 
Soul,' by Brierly, and 'Religion of a Mature 

94 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

Mind/ by Coe. I took the psychology on my 
vacation and read and studied it through, and 
enjoyed every page of it. 'Studies of the SouF 

I kept for the home trip with Mr. T. , and 

we read it with much pleasure, as did you and 
dear Mrs. Hayes a few years before. Then I 
re-read it alone in October. 'Religion of a 
Mature Mind' I am reading. Should be glad 
to buy all three books, especially 'Studies of 
the Soul/ because of the writing on the fly- 
leaf. 

"Have received since coming here, 'An Out- 
line of Christian Theology/ by Clarke, and 
'Messages of the Bibles — Daniel and Revela- 
tion/ by Porter, which I am enjoying. 

"May these last days be your best days, and 
the physical suffering the least possible at the 
close. 

"With gratitude that I have been permitted 
to know you, 

"E. G. T." 

"My Dear Mrs. Cox: — If your father is 
able to hear, will you please tell him that in 
a letter to-day received from J. F., a classmate 
of Mr. C, he writes: 'The reading of your 

95 



A Memoir of 

letter has awakened feelings of sorrow to 
hear of the death of our former classmates, 
Littlefleld and Knowlton, and of the alarming 
condition of that accomplished teacher and 
scholarly gentleman, dear Professor Hayes. 
If he is able to receive any message from me, 
I wish that you would bear to him my sincere 
love and respect with my heartfelt gratitude 
for the high ideals and incentives to noble 
living which his earnest words and Christian 
example always inspired. "E. F. C." 

The writers of the preceding letters were 
students under Professor Hayes in Bates Col- 
lege. The following letter is from one who 
has been a student in his classes in Cobb 
Divinity School: 

"My Dear Professor Hayes :— Coming 
through Boston not many days since, I met 
Dean Howe at the North Station, and he told 
me that you were sick, and that the doctors do 
not give you any great amount of encourage- 
ment as to recovery. 

"Did I not know from what the Dean told 
me that the doctors have told you the facts 
of the case, I should not have spoken that 
first sentence so bluntly; and did I not have 

96 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

in mind the photograph of a spirit that knows 
no fear just because the days lead down toward 
the end of the way here on earth, there might 
be cause for speaking a little differently. 

"I send this note, Professor Hayes, not that 
it can be any aid in the overcoming of a malady 
that it is not mine to treat, but simply that 
you may know the kindly regard that some 
of us boys have for the man we were wont to 
call, without the slightest implication of dis- 
respect, "Benny." Also that you may know 
the sympathy that comes as a spontaneous re- 
turn for the kindly spirit and inspiration that 
you have lent to many of us in and around the 
classroom in Roger Williams Hall, and the 
regret that cannot be different from a real 
sorrow at the word which comes through Dean 
Howe. 

"As I told Professor Stanton, at least a 
part of us who once were there bear some 
hall-marks of goodness which have been im- 
pressed upon us by the lives of those over us 
in the capacity of teachers then; yes, more 
than teachers, elder friends. That we do not 
bear more of those marks is due to our own 
unassimilative character. 

97 



A Memoir of 

"You have been the instrument of revising 
my tests of Christianity. What I, as a boy, 
thought to be two impossibles found union 
in yourself, and I have learned that a dogma- 
tic and prejudiced position on one side or the 
other of a given theory is not the test of a 
saving and acceptable faith in God through 
Jesus Christ. 

"I 3ay these things because they are true, 
and I hope that they may convey to you some- 
thing of the esteem in which I hold you, based 
upon a consciousness of having been helped 
by your life and teaching. 

"If in the providence of God it must be that 
you soon follow, as was said of President 
Harper, (death's messenger through the open 
door into life,) then may you go bearing as 
trophy of the day and time passed here with 
us, the hearty and loving testimony of help 
given along the lines of what is best and most 
abiding in life now and to be. 

"I recall two or three times of special pleas- 
ure to me : one, a time when in the classroom 
we had a little jar over essays, and the spirit 
displayed in the face of a very harsh statement 
from some of us was good to have stamped 

98 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

upon our minds ; and another, one night after 
I had left school, and Mrs. Hayes had taken 
the journey to the other life, I sat in the 
library and talked with you during the chapel- 
hour instead of going in. Two statements 
made by you at that time I recall : one, that 
somehow the silver side of the cloud had been 
out to you all the time during the loss of Mrs. 
Hayes ; and the other, that you were glad that 
at such a time your feet touched something 
in which there was no tremor. 

"I judge it is so now, Professor Hayes, and 
the only possible lament which I can think 
of for you is the one made by Shaftsbury near 
his death: 'I hope it is not wrong to say it, 
but I cannot bear the thought of dying when 
there is so much to be done in the world/ 

"I must close. If we are not privileged to 
meet again in this world, then may faith and 
fidelity in the time of fruition call us together 
once again in the by and by, and in the "up- 
per chamber" of His loving plan. Pray for me. 
I need your prayers more than you need mine. 
I have life to live. You have only the larger 
life to gain. 

"Yours in the bond, born of the faith, 

"G. E. M." 

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A Memoir of 

A minister, himself venerable, wrote as 
follows : 

"Dear Brother Hayes: — I was very sorry 
to hear, by way of Dr. Anthony, that you were 
sick. I have always looked up to you as a 
father. You have been that to me. When I 
was but a boy, preaching in Brunswick, you 
helped me greatly by your wise counsel and 
encouraging words. All the way along, down 
to the present time, your fatherly advice and 
cheerful words have been a help and inspira- 
tion to me. Your life, as well as your words, 
has been before me, a living example of a 
noble and Godly manhood, which has led me 
to say many times, 'Help me, Lord, that I 
may live as pure and noble a life as his.' May 
the same dear Lord and blessed Christ, whom 
you have held up before others, be your com- 
fort and joy and strong help in these days of 
loneliness and suffering. I hope and pray that 
your work is not yet done, but that you may 
be raised to a good degree of health and still 
reflect the goodness of God into other lives. 

"If it is otherwise appointed, may the bless- 
ed light so shine before you that you may have 
a clear view of the heavenly home where all 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

is love and peace and rest. Thank God, your 
life will live on by your words spoken and 
written for generations to come, and your 
influence for ages yet to be. Mrs. E. unites 
with me in sending our love and prayers. 
"Yours in Christian love, 

"B. M. E." 

A response to a wedding gift contained the 
following : 

"My Dear Professor Hayes : — I am sure I 

want to thank you not only for this present, 

but, if I may, for all the good you have done 

me, without knowing it. Ever since I have 

been old enough to understand anything, the 

names of Professor and Mrs. Hayes have stood 

to me for all that is noble and true, and that 

has been the greatest gift. 

"Yours sincerely, 

"M. J. B." 

The following was from Professor T. L. 
Angell, for nearly forty years a colleague at 
Bates, now residing at Washington, D. C. : 

"Dear Professor Hayes: — I think of you 
daily and almost hourly, and am anxious to 
learn just how you are. Untroubled in spirit, I 

101 



A Memoir of 

know, but in body I fear it may be far other- 
wise. My own sad experience in my home 
leads me to expect this, but I do hope and 
pray that you may be spared long and severe 
suffering. Few men, I believe; brought where 
you now are, have reason to look back upon 
life with as much satisfaction as you may, and 
forward to the better land with as calm assur- 
ance and as soul-satisfying hope. Hundreds 
of students and hosts of friends to whom you 
have ministered and to whom your life has 
been a sweet and constant inspiration, love 
you to-day with a depth and fervor that I 
suspect you but imperfectly comprehend. 

"For myself I thank God for our long years 
of acquaintance, all of which have been of 
incalulable worth to me. May God grant a 
gentle release from earth and an abundant, a 
glorious entrance into heaven. 

"Affectionately yours, 

"T. L. A." 

A letter written to me after my father's 
death by one who for many years had been 
his colleague contained the following : 

"For more than forty years I have been inti 
mately acquainted with him, and I deliberately 

102 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 

say that to no person whom I have ever known 
do I yield so genuine respect or more sincere 
love. His life has been to me an unvarying in- 
spiration and benediction." 

The editor of The Times, Los Angeles, Cali- 
fornia, wrote thus : 

"My Dear Professor: — I have read in the 
Lewiston Journal of your sufferings and your 
bravery, and I believe it's no more than right 
to let you know that the effect of your godly 
living is felt on the farthest horizon. 

"Faith, besides removing mountains, be- 
strides continents, spans the oceans, and makes 
of all space a palm's breadth. A great spirit 
not only lives in all ages, but touches the 
souls of the whole universe; it is a world- 
force, propelling and uplifting wherever the 
breath that God breathed into man is one with 
the atmosphere of the planet. We little real 
ize, I believe, how far-spreading and how 
potent is its unseen but eternal impetus. 

"I must say, my dear professor, that as a 
neighbor I learned to love and admire you ; 
that you have often been in my thoughts dur- 
ing the past ten years, and that your life has 

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A Memoir of 

had an influence for good upon mine. God be 
praised for the largeness and richness of such 
souls! With the host of these, meanness and 
pettiness shall be conquered. If I live longer 
than you, Professor, I shall try to help in some 
of the ways you would have helped. 

"With regards to your family, and not ex- 
pecting an answer, 

"Sincerely and ever yours, 

"Harry E. Andrews." 

The following was from Hon. F. L. Dingley, 
editor of the most important newspaper in 
Maine, and a brother of the late Congressman 
Dingley. 

"My Dear Professor: — I want to get in 
touch with you once more before the time of 
mustering out, and to assure you that your 
fortitude, patience, and faith in the divine 
love are a greater contribution to the life, hope, 
and spiritual development of this community 
and of all that come within range of your in- 
fluence, through the printed words, than the 
ministry of any influence no matter how pre- 
cious and worthy, that comes to my mind with- 
in my recollection. The only other voice that 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

stands to me for as much or for near as much 
as yours is that of the Rev. A. P. Tinker, who 
though dead yet speaks more competently than 
when his eloquence fell upon us. What the 
Journal calls the anodyne of faith in immor- 
tality has been so modestly but completely il- 
lustrated in your recent work and words, that 
no skeptic can gainsay it. It is easy to upset 
Christian argument until it is backed by Chris 
tian conduct. The invincible answer to skep- 
ticism is the Word made flesh. 

"Having just seen my oldest child pass hence 
into the eternal life at the age of forty-one 
years, I have felt more conscious than ever be- 
fore of the strength and reality of the ever- 
lasting arms and of everlasting life. I remem- 
ber, as a lad, attending the old academy, noting 
your return from college to the old house near 
by, and I never lost the fine impression which 
the life of your good father and mother made 
upon me. That they have lived, not only in 
heaven, but in your personality on earth, is 
clear to me. The effacement of pride, spiritual 
vanity, and the conceit of righteousness is the 
beginning of wisdom. The simplicity of the 
child that must be reproduced in manhood, if 

105 



A Memoir of 

it be Christian manhood, was embodied in your 
ancestry, and you lived and breathed and had 
your being, as it seems to me, in that rein- 
carnation. As you feel yourself to be in the 
borderland, and only God knows how near to 
that border any one of us may be, I am not 
surprised that you have a special up-lift, 
celestial reinforcement, and that a power out- 
side yourself, which all your life has made for 
righteousness, already gives you the prophecy 
of the new body, painless and perfected out of 
suffering. When you cross the borderland you 
will meet my boy, my brother, my father, and 
my mother, as well as your own beloved, and 
there you will see as you are seen, and know 
as you are known. 

"Heaven be praised for the example which 
you set before the faithful and the faithless 
alike. It is the best sermon because it is the 
living soul. God help you, as he certainly will, 
to the last, when death shall be swallowed up 
in victory. 

"Very truly yours, 

"P. L. D." 

Official messages of condolence and ap- 
preciation were sent him by various organ- 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

izations or assemblages. Of resolutions passed 
subsequent to his decease the following are re- 
produced : 

To the Children of Professor Benjamin F. 
Hayes, D.D., 

"Dear Friends: — At a meeting of the fa- 
culty of Cobb Divinity School held Friday, 
March 9, 1906, the following record of ap- 
preciation of your father, our beloved col- 
league, was ordered: 

"He has left behind a finished work and a 
memory that is noble and pure. His service to 
the Christian Church and his denomination 
cannot be estimated. He lives in the life and 
teaching of many of our preachers to-day. 
None could be with him, as we have been 
privileged to be for many years, without ap- 
preciating and loving his sweet and beautiful 
spirit, without feeling his firm and simple 
faith, his penetrating spiritual insight, and, 
yet, his philosophic cast of mind with its 
breadth of view, its clear judgment, its power 
to find the fundamental and the ultimate. He 
demanded intellectual freedom in the interest 
of religion and faith itself. The very strength 
of his religious faith gave him not merely 

107 



A Meinoir of 

tolerance and charity, but led him to the keen- 
est scrutiny of every creed and doctrine of 
man, and to the rejection of all that was not 
in accord with the rational character of the 
mind or was contrary to the laws of thought. 
He had so much faith in God as to believe that 
there is such a kinship between the soul and 
truth that they will know and recognize each 
other. Many men through him have been help- 
ed into a larger view of life, and have been 
inspired by his faith and spirit. 

"With you we miss him, and yet with you 
we rejoice in him. 

The following resolutions were passed by 
the Pastors' Union of Lewiston and Auburn : 

"Inasmuch as it has pleased our Father in 
heaven to take from us and to receive unto 
himself our fellow-laborer, Prof. B. F. Hayes, 
we, the members of the Pastors' Union of 
Lewiston and Auburn, desire to record our 
appreciation of his mature Christian charac- 
ter and ripe scholarship. To us he seemed a 
scholar of the highest type, loving learning 
for its own sake, and even more as a revelation 
of the divine thought; with the roots of his 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

belief in the common and ancient facts of our 
faith, he yet in a wonderful way for one of 
older years, opened his mind and heart to the 
newer truths of God's constant revelation of 
himself through patient scholarship. But 
even more marked to us appeared the excel- 
lence of his Christian character. United to an 
appreciation of the many-sided relations of 
Christian life, there was a simplicity and 
childlikeness of faith that approached very 
near to the ideal laid before us by our divine 
Lord. With this simplicity of thought was a 
mature strength, to which the faith and for- 
titude with which he approached death abun- 
dantly testify. To us he seemed a faithful 
disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one 
whose life and labors have enriched the king- 
dom of God in the world." 

Eesolutions upon the decease of Doctor 
Hayes, passed by the Alumni Association of 
Cobb Divinity School, at their annual meet- 
ing in June, 1906, contained the following ex- 
pressions : 

"We miss his wise counsel, his loving com- 
radeship, his profound knowledge of men and 
books. This association will always cherish 

109 



A Memoir of 



his memory as a most learned man and a 
great saint. As one whose spirituality created 
an atmosphere in which it was good for his 
students and friends to live." 



no 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 



CHAPTER VII. 

AN APPRECIATION OF PROFESSOR HAYES, 
BY REV. CARTER E. CATE, D.D. 

Doctor Carter E. Cate, pastor of the Roger 
Williams Church in Providence, Rhode Is- 
land, who delivered the annual oration before 
the alumni of Cobb Divinity School, June 27, 
1906, chose as the subject of his address on 
that occasion the character of Professor 
Hayes. His address is as follows : 

I think the word "appreciation" expresses 
most nearly my purpose in what I have under- 
taken for this hour — a sympathetic study of 
the character and some interpretation of the 
thought of Professor Benjamin Francis Hayes. 

I could not be expected to give a biograph- 
ical sketch, nor shall I attempt a valuation 
of his services as teacher and preacher and 
Christian citizen. This office must be dis- 
charged by some one who has a better right 
than I, a fuller knowledge growing out of a 
more intimate acquaintance. But if I could 

ill 



A Memoir of 

stand amongst you and, seeing him as he was, 
report unto you the things I saw as most 
characteristic of the man, if I could reflect a 
little of the deep and tranquil light that was 
in him, this I know would be the greatest 
service I could render in his memory. 

Let me say, it has been a blessing to me to 
have had occasion to rest my thought upon 
so genuine and saintly a figure — to have seen 
him moving beside me in all the moments 
which I have devoted to this writing. 

I suppose we all feel that personality is 
the greatest thing — greatest in God our Father 
and so greatest in man, his child. To know 
only the outward facts of one's life is very 
little. Such knowledge is mockingly empty 
and superficial. But to be able to understand 
the motive behind the thing done, to catch the 
accent of the spirit within the word spoken, 
to feel the glow of a love-saturated heart — 
this is what the Greeks called "epignosis" — 
the fuller, deeper knowledge. 

But the attempt to penetrate thus into the 
innermost life of a man is often difficult — is 
like ploughing a New England sub-soil. We 
cannot be quite certain whether the world and 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

the deed are to be regarded as mere products 
of the intellect, however masterful, or as 
sparks glowing with the light and heat of the 
central passion. We cannot always be certain 
whether a person is playing a part or living 
a life. 

But our revered teacher has lived openly 
amongst us — seems even with us still. If there 
were depths and secrets of his nature into 
which we had not penetrated, this was so not 
because he was anything, or had anything, or 
knew anything to conceal, but because of the 
bluntness of our sight. 

This, I should say, is one of the most obvi- 
ous and finest traits of his character, its com- 
plete openness. It had its moral significance 
— it defined his attitude toward truth, it reg- 
ulated his contacts with men and expressed, 
in part, his relations to God. He had no oc- 
casion for pretext and subterfuge, for mere 
plausibilities and tactics. Here we have had 
amongst us one who was what he seemed to 
be, one who took least thought as to how he 
might appear in the eyes of men, one who 
walked in his integrity. 

This was doubtless the spring of that 

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A Memoir of 

charming simplicity of heart and manner 
which was so marked in him. In this he re- 
sembled his noble co-laborer of many years, 
whose blessing is still upon our school, Prof. 
John Fullonton. The artificialities of our 
civilization and its intense pressures had not 
robbed him of a certain naturalness, a certain 
naivete, which are not always easily preserved 
in our day — the fresh heart of the child beat- 
ing in the bosom of the mature man. He found 
God without going far from nature. His 
spirit suggested, not so much the voluptuous 
garden roses, as those that blossom in the 
meadow. 

His mind was open to all truth. He wel- 
comed it from whatever sphere cast, and upon 
whatever subject thrown. Truths were the 
branches, truth was the tree, and the tree was 
rooted in God. Without this comprehensive- 
ness of view he never could have attained 
that sense of harmony in the divine order of 
the universe which was so assured in him. 

Being thus open to receive, he was also 
open to transmit. As there was nothing to 
conceal, so there was nothing to keep. So 
far from being a dark cave into which the 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

light falls and is absorbed, his soul was a 
burnished mirror from which the light w T as 
reflected. 

There are those who strive forever after a 
communism in material things where it is 
quite impracticable. But there is a realm in 
which communism is the very law of life. It 
is the realm of our highest being, where our 
incorruptible treasures are — in which Isaiah 
and Homer, Plato and Virgil, Dante and 
Raphael, Shakespeare and Goethe, Sir John 
Lyster and Pasteur, St. Paul and St. John, 
and preeminent over all, the Lord Christ, live 
and rule and offer "without money and with- 
out price" their respective gifts, even unto 
Life Eternal. Of this glorious commonwealth 
of the spirit, Benjamin Francis Hayes was a 
citizen. 

Naturally such a mind would flourish and 
bring forth fruit, even in old age. Indeed, 
there could be no old age for such a one. For 
freshness is of life, and life means growth. 
Even the knowledge that does not grow gets 
speedily to be "as dry as dust." A mature 
German scholar said lately, "I am going over 
to the fatherland again for a year." "Again?" 

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was the query. "Yes," he answered, "I must 
grow in my knowledge of this people, their 
literature, their history, their land itself, if 
I would not fail in enthusiasm and power as 
a teacher of their language." Ah, this is the 
open secret of intellectual power and enthu- 
siasm. And what a superb example of this 
progressive mind was Dr. Hayes. Surely his 
thoughts did "widen with the process of the 
suns." 

I should say his knowledge was more com- 
prehensive than that of almost any scholar we 
have had. He was not only a deeply learned 
man, he was a most variously and widely edu- 
cated man. A friend of mine has sometime 
said that the best educated person is one who 
has related himself at the largest number of 
points in the universe. How completely he 
had found his place — -how thoroughly at home 
he was in his Father's house of many man- 
sions. It all lay about him most invitingly. 
Every outward path led in to God. 

He grew, not only in reach, but also in 
depth. His mind was not a mere storehouse 
for the accumulation of knowledge, it was a 
laboratory where the facts of knowledge are 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

received and analyzed and classified. Every- 
thing had its place and meaning in the whole, 
and the chief interest attaching to the in- 
dividual part, be it great or small, phenomenon 
physical or spiritual, was its power to make 
a little more clear and comprehensive our 
grasp of that whole as the universe of God. 

Thus he grew out of intellectual provinci- 
alism and became cosmopolitan. In this sense 
he was a Universalist ; for I have often wished 
that the terms "Catholic" and "Universalist" 
were emptied of their particular and exclusive 
meaning, so that they might be available to 
apply to such a character as that before us 
to-day. There was nothing close or illiberal 
about him. No "winds from unsunned spaces 
blown" swept through his soul. 

His mind was reflective. Many men know 
a great deal and yet never seem to get much 
out of their knowledge. It is, indeed, amaz- 
ing to see how little culture or power may be 
associated even with high scholarship. Such 
minds may lack imagination, or, oftenest, as 
I have thought, they have not formed the 
habit of reflection. For it is the long, calm, 
expectant gaze that pierces into the heart of 

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things and perceives that which is of supreme 
interest, the relations of things. 

Am I not right altogether in setting this 
down as a most characteristic trait of Pro- 
fessor Hayes? We remember the far-away, 
abstracted look that came often into his eyes. 
In those moments he was surveying his sub- 
ject, sinking his plummet a little deeper, push- 
ing out a little farther into the untrodden 
beyond. Sometimes when insight quickens, 
sight grows dim. Wordsworth has said, "My 
mind makes pictures when my eyes are shut." 

There are, I know, limitations upon this, as 
upon every human faculty. It does not always 
conduce to clearness. It sometimes leaves the 
mind as God leaves the atmosphere, with its 
far and misty reaches. We have always with 
us many who demand and many, doubtless, 
who need some sharpness of definition. 

But, on the other hand, without some der 
gree of this penetrating power, what a flat, 
thin, commonplace thing this world would be. 
It would have neither refreshing depth nor in- 
spiring height. It would all lie in two dimen- 
sions. But it is the third dimension that gives 
power, and grandeur, and glory. 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

God made the universe in the beginning, but 
I see more and more that every man has to 
reconstruct it for himself. It is great, and 
rich, and wonderful, and divine, according to 
the measure of his own soul. Who wonders 
that Tennyson should cry out: "What know 
we greater than the soul !" 

Ah, it is eternally true that we carry our 
own world into whatever world we go. It is 
not for every one who goes out into the sum- 
mertime that the trees of the field clap their 
hands — not for every one is the wayside "bush 
aflame with God." 

I have often thought I should like to look 
once through Galileo's little telescope that 
is treasured there in Florence, and once 
through the great instrument "that nightly 
assaults the skies" on Mt. Hamilton. But it 
would be a vastly greater privilege to look out 
on life through the anointed eyes of such a 
man as this man was. Moving serenely on 
life's voyage he heard "deep calling unto 
deep." 

Professor Hayes had in his nature a mystic 
fiber. He heard words that were unutterable. 
Truth came to him by the old, trodden, la- 

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beled thoroughfares, and it came also by 
secret little by-paths. Coming so, it was, like 
the light, self -evidencing. He could "be still 
and know that the Lord is God." Indeed, "who 
by searching can find out the Almighty!" It 
was given unto man once in the beginning to 
recognize the voice of the Lord in the cool of 
the day— and is this not still the truth of the 

poet's lines : 

"One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world has never lost." 

How much less a spirit so heedful, so re- 
sponsive as his. 

Ah, there is a sphere that lies beyond our 
formulas and definitions. It is a realm of rich 
suggestiveness, of subtle cogencies that grasp 
the soul as with a hand of magic tenderness 
and strength. Whoever knew Doctor Hayes 
at all well must have felt that his was the 
power to draw upon this overworld— this in- 
ner-world — for elements without which our 
philosophies and our theologies cannot ex- 
press the whole of human life. 

His, too, was a rich sense of beauty. We 
who heard him speak remember well how 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

musical our mother tongue was as it fell from 
his lips. There was always a certain choice- 
ness about it that betokened not only the 
scholar, but also the artist. You had only to 
see him, as some of us have, with a trail of 
arbutus or a spray of delicate ferns in his 
hand to know how responsive his spirit was to 
all forms of loveliness. He might have said 
with old Plato, "God is beauty." He doubt- 
less prayed with the psalmist, "Let the beauty 
of the Lord our God be upon us." For it was 
something more to him than the curve and 
flash of a ripple upon the surface of things — 
it was a sort of fluorescence from the very 
presence of God in his world. 

He had a Puritan conscience. When we 
speak of Puritanism our attention is apt to 
fix itself upon certain excesses of zeal of 
which it has been guilty. But these are to be 
regarded as accidents, or incidents, in the 
course of its development. The thing itself is 
a progressive moral sense. 

It is not a mere setting of metes and bounds. 
It is the implanting of a principle of right- 
eousness at life's core that shall work out 
and out, and bring at last "every thought into 

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captivity to the obedience of Christ." With 
what marvelous exactness has the apostle 
stated it as "the inquiry" — not the mere an- 
swer — "the inquiry of a good conscience." 

Mystic that he was, philosophical as were 
all his habits of thought, cloistered as his life 
had been, in a sense, for many years, his was 
that entire sound-heartedness, that heroic 
self-mastery, that uncompromising demand 
for righteousness in church and state, which 
characterized the Puritan conscience. 

For him there was not, as for some, a 
great gulf fixed between the moral and the 
spiritual; the one was the normal mode of 
the other's being. And so his powers were 
saved from dissipation. All was woven up in- 
to the firm texture of a Christian character. 
Here was reality ; here was truth in the in- 
ward parts and the garment undefiled. It 
was the righteousness of Christ, not so much 
imputed as imparted, that engaged his inter- 
est. He, with Banquo, kept "his enfranchised 
bosom and his allegiance clear," and so there 
was fulfilled in him a precious word of our 
Master's, — in him as in few others amongst 
us, — "thy whole body shall be full of light." 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

But, as I judge, the most distinguishing 
and impressive trait of his character was his 
sense of the eternal. To him, eminently, faith 
was "the substance of things hoped for, the 
evidence of things not seen!" 

I could wish we had before us his own ac- 
count of his personal faith, how it sprung up 
in the beginning, what its struggles were and 
its victories, how it was nourished and what 
it yielded in his life. It all seemed so natural 
and spontaneous that one might fancy it was 
a sort of special endowment, and inheritance, 
let me suggest, from the radiant spirit of the 
woman who gave him birth. 

But, however favorable the natural predis- 
positions may have been, any such sense of the 
eternal as his must have been altogether per- 
sonal and positive. It was not as something 
cast in a mold, but as something wrought, 
like Ghiberti's gates, with infinite pains and 
under the unfailing inspirations of love. 

It seemed to be the assent of his whole 
being. In Millet's painting, as you remember, 
the peasants rise up out of the dust at the 
call of the Angelus. The man drops his head 
a little, and awkwardly, but the woman, with 

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a fine, full grace, bends in a curve that touches 
her whole body from sandaled foot to ker- 
chiefed brow. So stands this man of God in 
our sight. Reason and instinct, affection and 
will, literary culture, and spiritual depth, all 
united in the great confession — I believe. 

And this is the reason why there was such 
spontaneity, such naturalness, such pervas- 
iveness, such assurance of his faith. It was 
the verdict, not of one, but of all his faculties. 
It was achieved not by strangling some and 
forcing others. Rooted in the depths, it grew 
up into his whole life and at once possessed 
and informed his every power. Ah, this is the 
supreme victory, when all the energies of the 
soul are so gathered up in the grasp of faith 
in the living God that they issue as an integer, 
a unit of spiritual life and power. 

"Surely thus our heart was meant 
To beat in vast content, 
Like chord of one great instrument/' 

Being such, his faith yielded him, not bond- 
age, but liberty. It was not a hard-twisted, 
steel cable, but a great, vital principle. He 
was not like a ship lashed to an iron pier in 
the Bay of Fundy, to be racked with every 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

rising and falling tide; he was, rather, like 
a ship anchored securely in the deep. He felt 
the currents that flowed about him and the 
winds that swept his brow; but he was with- 
out fear, for he knew Him whom his soul had 
grappled. 

Professor Hayes went farther in his think- 
ing than most of us have gone, or could ever 
go. Having such a grasp on the substance of 
our gospel, he could safely cast aside many of 
the physical symbols which are clustered 
about it. He could distinguish more clearly 
than many others between the non-essential 
and the essential. A negative or destructive 
attitude was impossible to one whose faith was 
so positive and vital. Drawing ever nearer in 
his personal experience, and rising ever higher 
in his moral attainments, he saw more clearly 
and directly into the very heart of Christ. 

Simplicity of faith ought to mean inten- 
sity. Although it does not yield this result 
for all men, it did for him. It is a bit of child- 
ish folly that fills one's hands so full of many 
things that one holds nothing securely. This 
process of simplification of the beliefs of 
Christendom has been going on apace now 

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A Memoir of 

for a generation and it ought to issue in a 
great access of power. In him we saw what 
is possible. He moved out and also in, he 
reached up, and at the same time struck the 
roots of his faith downward. And so his 
mind was saved from intellectual bravado, 
and his soul from spiritual anaemia. 

Religion and life being so completely one 
in him, he had, as once I heard him ask in 
prayer, leisure from self. Conscious of God, 
conscious of his brother, he was marvelously 
free from selfconsciousness. When have we 
known a more transparent, a more beautiful, 
since artless and deep, humility than his! 
There was nothing mawkish about it, for he 
was altogether a man. It was like a garment, 
but clothed him as the light does the flower. 

In setting down these reflections I have 
more than once paused, as if I saw him lift 
his hand in protest. The words which Mrs. 
Browning has set upon the lips of the Virgin 
Mary might have been his own : 

"Say (of me) blessedest, 

Not holiest, not noblest, no high name, 
Whose height misplaced 
May pierce me like a shame, 

When I sit meek in heaven." 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

And yet so it was. Faith was in him the sense 

of the Eternal. 

"He was very sure of God 
And very certain of the soul." 

And so we have known a man who walked 
with God; whose scholarship was fresh and 
masterful; and who, not as often, in spite of, 
but by very reason of all this, believed the 
more serenely and triumphantly ; one to whom 
the spiritual was real and the eternal present ; 
one who, walking the dusty ways of earth, 
brought with him the fragrance of Paradise. 

And all was transfused with love, or to use 
the apostle's figure, love was the girdle that 
bound up all his varied powers and acquisi- 
tions into a beautiful symmetry. Occasionally 
a student has come away from this teacher not 
quite certain of the teaching, — there was 
never but one universal Master, and him his 
own disciples did not wholly understand, — 
yet I venture that no one ever came near 
Professor Hayes who did not bear away on 
his soul the impress of his Christly love. 

However great a thing it may be to impart 
knowledge, to enkindle enthusiasm, to liber- 
ate the powers of the intellect and so lead a 

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A Memoir of 

pupil on to self-realization, I hold it to be 
the chief blessing of one life upon another 
simply to love another as Christ loves us all. 
Nor can I forebear to mention that dear 
home into whose hallowed atmosphere we 
have all been welcomed again and again, or 
her on whose noble brow there sat the un- 
conscious halo. It all stands out in our mem- 
ory as the very apotheosis of consecrated do- 
mestic life and love. Not apart in a hermit 
cell, but in the bosom of his family, not in 
unsocial loneliness, but in the midst of the 
homely cares and joys this saint achieved his 
sanctity. Here, doubtless, were wrought 
those finest qualities of mind and heart that 

linger with us as 

"The grace of a day that is done." 

Nor can we ever forget the reverent fond- 
ness with which he spoke the name of Jesus. 
It was as to one sitting above all heavens, 
and yet "nearer than breathing." 

Such intimacy, such nearness, few men in 

the flesh attain. 

"And when the gates of life swung in, 
And angels whispered low 
To bid him hasten unto God, 
He had not far to go." 

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Professor Hayes at Seventy-Five Years of Age. 



Benjamin Francis Hayes 



CHAPTER VIII. 

A SERMON ON "THE LIFE TO COME/' BY 
PROFESSOR HAYES. 

During the two years previous to his death 
and subsequent to the death of his wife, the 
mind of Doctor Hayes was exceedingly occu- 
pied with thoughts of her, and in consequence 
it turned toward the subject of the future 
life. He was, however, free from the type 
of mourning so common among those who 
have loved, and delighted in sympathetic com- 
radeship, as he had done ; for he was genuinely 
sustained by confidence in an immortality of 
reunion. Just before the warning of his 
physicians that his own decease was near, he 
preached in the Pine Street Congrational 
Church of Lewiston a sermon on life here- 
after, which produced a notable effect. After 
the diagnosis of the physicians his thoughts 
of course continued in the same direction, 
and the selection of this particular sermon 
for inclusion in this memoir is according to 
his own expressed desire. This relieves his 
children of the responsibility of selection. The 

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A Memoir of 

theme is one that almost necessitates a some- 
what speculative treatment. The notes which 
he left were difficult to decipher, and no doubt 
quite imperfectly represent his spoken 
thought, as of course they give no hint of the 
magnetism of its utterance. The sermon is as 
follows : 

i 

1 John 3 : 2. "Beloved, now are we the sons 
of God, and it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be, but we know that when he shall ap- 
pear we shall be like him, for we shall see 
him as he is." 

In this verse the beloved disciple is telling 
us how he finds it possible to be entirely con- 
tent, though he must for the whole of his life 
remain in ignorance of some things of great 
importance to himself. He does not know 
what he will be, how he will live, what his 
employments or what his enjoyments will be 
in the hereafter. 

Unanswered questions, unsolved problems, 
especially when they relate to human wel- 
fare or to our destiny, only whet the eager- 
ness of search in aspiring minds. It is not he 
who has settled the most questions who has 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

the smallest number of great problems yet to 
be worked out. It is he who has climbed 
highest, the horizon of whose vision is the 
widest, who is most interested in that which 
doth not yet appear. It is the person of little 
thought, of low aims, without high hopes, 
without struggle, without progress, who is 
perplexed by no mysteries. The poet, Cow- 
per, thus pictures such a man. 

"The primrose on the river's brink, 

A yellow primrose was to him, and it was nothing more." 

But he whose awakened thought has begun to 
penetrate the mysteries of nature around him 
is aware that in the sheen of a leaf, the glit- 
ter of a drop of dew, the mystery of a crystal's 
regular form, the plan, the shape, and the 
hues of a flower, are locked up secrets that 
it may make him both wiser and happier to 
know. Such was the thought of Tennyson 
when he wrote: 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here root and all in my hand, 
Little flower, but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

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If to see through the mystery of the little 
familiar objects about us is also to solve the 
problem of man's life and of the indwelling 
God, in whom we live, and by whom all things 
consist, it need not surprise us to be told that 
we cannot yet know what tve shall fee. As 
soon as we know enough about the outside of 
things to look beneath the surface, we find 
that we do not know what anything is in its 
inner substance and in its relations to other 
things. All the paths along which knowledge 
is pursued run out soon or late into regions 
of impenetrable mystery. Why, for example, 
do we call a leaf green, a flower red, a dew- 
drop white, a gem purple. Because some power 
in each, by the medium of reflected light, af- 
fects our eye nerves differently ; and not merely 
the nerves of the eye, but the brain behind 
the eye and the soul behind the brain. It is 
the power of the all-wise and the inscrutable 
God. Wherever there is weight or bulk that 
can be measured, there is power. Every clod 
exists "through some higher energy, for from 
itself alone it could not be." Every atom in 
the stone you lift is tugging to get toward the 
earth and every atom in the earth is pulling 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

upon it. This mutual pull is the same power 
by which our earth and moon and every 
planet, sun and star, are gripped and held 
by every other ; and this energy, this support- 
ting power by which all worlds are kept in 
balance, as they for eons sweep through the 
tireless spheral dance, can be nothing else than 
the omnipresent God, 

"Whose presence bright all space doth occupy, 
All motion guide." 

If we are baffled by the great and still in- 
soluble mysteries of man's being, and the 
being of the immanent God, if we are thus 
ingnorant of what man now is, still less can it 
appear what we shall be. 

But the fact that we cannot hope for a com- 
plete answer does not prevent us from asking 
the question. When we are children we often 
try to imagine what it will be to be grown up, 
to go where we please, to become acquainted 
with the wide world, and to take part in its 
great enterprises. We cannot know these 
things till we come to them in our experience, 
but this does not prevent us from inquiring. 
And it is the boy and girl who think about 
what it is best to be when grown up, who are 

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A Memoir of 

most likely to be what is best when maturity 
is reached. It is now, dear children, in the 
study and the play of childhood, as you study 
earnestly or carelessly, as you play fairly and 
kindly, or piggishly and crossly, that you are 
determining what kind of men and women you 
will be. Only you need not be discouraged if 
you find you have failed once and again, and 
have to be ashamed of yourselves; you have 
time yet to outgrow your blunders. It is the 
child who is never ashamed, the child who 
does not care, that has reason to be alarmed 
when he asks, "What shall I be?" So also we 
who are adults, as we see those who have been 
passing through the discipline of life's school 
in most dear and intimate association with 
ourselves, graduating into that beyond which 
we all must enter soon, can hardly avoid the 
question, "What are they now?" "What shall 
we be when we have passed through this ex- 
perience?" 

I. WE SHALL BE. 

Let us notice that though St. John tells us 
he does not know what we shall be, he does 
know one thing so surely that it is taken for 
granted without any assertion. It is the one 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

certainty he holds concerning the hereafter 
and which we, too, may hold without one 
tremor of doubt: we shall be. Two children 
once drifted in a little boat away from the 
shore of Cape Cod, out into the open sea, where 
nothing saluted their straining eyes but water, 
sky, and sun. By and by the sun went down, 
sunk like a ball of fire in the ocean. It seemed 
that it must be extinguished; but they knew 
better, and so in the darkness they lay down 
in each other's arms in the bottom of their 
boat and hoped that God would remember 
them in the morning. So from the beginning 
of the human race, appearances have seemed 
to say, when the waves go over a life whose 
love has been as sunshine to us, "He is extinct, 
he lives no more." Yet through all the ages 
the race has been persuaded that it is not so. 
Despite all the seeming, they believe that the 
life of our dear ones is not quenched in an 
ocean of nothingness ; and now since we know 
that Christ was dead and is alive forevermore, 
we know that soon, beyond the sowing and the 
reaping, we shall be. With death always 
standing before, with grim foreboding, and 
quenching one by one the lives of men, the race 

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A Memoir of 

has yet maintained the faith that we shall be. 
It is no wonder that here and there a thought- 
ful mind has doubted, that Romans of the Em- 
pire or Frenchmen of the Revolution, deter- 
mined to have no guide but reason, faced death 
as darkness without dawn. Yet even among 
them the voices of certain of their wisest re- 
affirm this faith. And reason that looks 
deeper than adverse appearances insists that 
whatever the impossibility of understanding 
how it is that we can continue to be, this 
greater and more wonderful question is set- 
tled — we shall continue. 

Those who study nature And ground for firm 
conviction that if there is a wise and good 
Creator, man is designed for a life beyond. 
This life considered as a preparation for a fur- 
ther existence is rational — considered as the 
whole, it is irrational. If unhatched chicks 
could reason, though they knew only life 
within the shell, they would have ground for 
firm assurance that hatching is not death, but 
birth. Not having eaten food, nor seen the 
earth, nor breathed the air, they could not 
know what their larger, freer life would be; 
but beak and feet and lungs and wings and 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

eyes are evidence that they are preparing for a 
life beyond their present state. If not, the 
life and growth within the egg is an irrational 
absurdity. Of itself the egg-life is not enough ; 
but it is far too much to be all. 

In an extensive and well-conducted nursery 
of trees, the favorable conditions for growth, 
the selected varieties of trees arranged in or- 
derly rows, are evidence that some one planned 
the planting who knew what he was about. 
And the order of nature is incomparably more 
complete evidence that man, the crown of 
creation, did not come into this life by acci- 
dent. Now the nursery, considered as a final- 
ity, is absurd and out of harmony with the 
evident intelligence with which it is instituted 
and conducted, because as soon as the trees 
approach maturity they are taken away — 
there they never get their growth or bear their 
fruit. And man's life here is likewise only a 
beginning. They who are here longest feel 
most sure that "we have to live one life to 
learn how to live." And they may be con- 
fident that if the reason that planned our 
existence is wise, this life is but life's begin- 
ning. There is such a promise unfulfilled, 

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A Memoir of 

there is such a beginning left incomplete, 
that both veracity and wisdom in God must 
be denied if we are not made for another and 
a wider life beyond. 

Creation has been going on for ages and 
ages, and all its stages were good. The polyp 
on the bottom of the sea, later the fish swim- 
ming through its waves, then the saurian with 
legs instead of fins, then the first birds, those 
that skimmed the water, then birds that sail 
the air, then as ages went by the successive 
orders of land animals that became food and 
servants to man — all were good ; for each order 
was a step up in the scale of being and a means 
of transition to higher life. Yet in their per- 
ishing no loss is felt, they had no expectations, 
no aspirations, no capacities for anything 
higher; and they each gave place to man. Man 
with his unfulfilled hope, with his capacities 
just prepared for use, is at the top of the 
ascending scale of earthly beings. There is 
nothing higher if man does not go on. Was 
the nursery for nothing but an amusement? 
Did the few years' growth in the nursery end 
all? No, no ; if man is not sent on to fruitful- 
ness and satisfaction then God has trifled, 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

not merely with capacities for further growth, 
but with immortal longings which he himself 
planted. He will have made in man conscious- 
ness, hope, love, intellectual and moral capac- 
ity only to be wasted ; and the inscription for 
this planet, in the cemetery of dead worlds — 
for this planet will be there in its turn — must 
be either nature's blunder or God's folly. So 
sure then as there is a God who is wise, man 
is immortal. 

II. WE SHALL BE INDEPENDENT OF THE BODY. 

In all the argument for immortality there 
is nothing to imply that the bodies of men will 
live forever, but only that their conscious life 
continues, and we may reasonably anticipate 
that life hereafter will be independent of any 
material body. Here we are composite of 
flesh and spirit, and that we continue to be so 
in the hereafter has been the common belief. 
Men of Egypt, India, and China, as well as the 
Mohammedans, have imagined that the life to 
come would be occupied with carnal pursuits 
and enjoyments. The Pharisees of old shared 
the same belief. Such is also the implication 
of all the Dantean and Miltonic pictures of 
heaven and hell. The supposition in the 

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preaching of former times, which represented 
the physical bodies of the lost dwelling in 
material flames, assumed that we may know 
what we shall be and that we shall then enjoy 
and suffer in our physical bodies. The text 
sets aside all such imaginings. 

The faith that resurrection life is spiritual, 
that we are born into it out of our bodies, 
seems to have been hard for men to apprehend 
and believe. The Greeks, who called the but- 
terfly Psyche, the soul, seemed unable to con- 
ceive that the human soul must not, when 
coming into resurrection life, like the butter- 
fly when born out of its chrysalis, take some- 
thing of its body with it. It is probable that 
some Christians, from the ancient times down 
to the present, have continued to take the 
worm and the butterfly as a type of the resur- 
rection, and to think that as the whole worm 
goes into a quiescent state in the chrysalis and 
by and by comes out with the same matter in 
his body and the same limbs, so the whole man 
goes into the grave and waits in unconscious- 
ness until a new, creative fiat shall reconstruct 
his body out of the old material. We have all 
been taught to* use phrases and to sing hymns 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

that teach this doctrine. A few years since a 
minister and author put forth in support of 
this doctrine the following as an argument, 
to him unanswerable: Suppose a living man 
were to be put in a metallic coffin and sealed 
up there hermetically, would not the whole 
man be there? And would not the whole 
man very soon be dead and all of him in the 
coffin? I suppose our Lord would say to this, 
as he did to the Jews : "Ye do err, not knowing 
the scriptures nor the power of God." And 
now science is saying the same thing. There, 
are, it says, powers that you have not consid- 
ered. You may shut up heat in iron, but the 
heat passes through the iron. Science tells 
us that the atoms of no substance, however 
solid it seems, ever absolutely press against 
each other, but are always jostling among 
themselves. If you touch a substance whose 
particles are quivering more rapidly than the 
particles of your hand, it feels warm or hot ; if 
less rapidly than the atoms in the hand, it 
feels cold. If you grasp the hand of a friend 
in which the atoms are less tremulous than in 
yours his hand will feel cold to you and yours 
warm to him. Light is something very real, 

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but it can move through glass and we can 
move glass through it. And electricity, if 
sealed up in metallic boxes, asks for no gate- 
way more open than the solid metal, and 
passes through it more easily than through 
vacant air. The power that thinks and feels 
and loves and wills is something very real, 
something very precious to God. It was to 
come up to it, to come to human minds, that 
he arranged all the orders of living things that 
make up the grand ascending scale of nature; 
but is not this highest, this most godlike power 
in the creation more subtle than any of the 
mysterious realities of material nature? Can 
you imprison it within a metallic coffin? At 
present, indeed, it takes both the physical and 
the spiritual to compose the man ; the two act 
only together, and body and spirit are ever 
acting on each other ; but the body only is now 
manifest. Of the spirit we may say that we 
know that it is, but it doth not yet appear 
what it is, and so we borrow a manner of 
speech that may date back to the Sadducees of 
Jesus' time, and call our bodies ourselves, and 
we say we have a soul, and sometimes have 
said to ourselves, "If I persevere in a course 

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of wicked neglect I shall lose my soul." Well, 
what shall we be and where shall we be when 
we have lost the soul? Jesus would teach us 
to say rather, We are souls, just now living in 
and using our bodies; we shall be souls still 
when we have finished our abode in the body. 
It is true that our Lord said, "All that are 
in their graves shall hear his voice and shall 
come forth." If man is nothing but a body, 
and therefore all that man is is in the grave, 
then the Lord must speak to the body in the 
grave; but if the man is a soul that is not in 
the grave, then our Lord in saying, "All in 
their graves," was just using the common lan- 
guage of the people, meaning all whom they 
called dead — a word which our Savior never 
uses except when forced to do so because his 
other expressions, such as "our friend Lazarus 
sleeps," are misunderstood. But if all men 
are souls and the souls are not in the grave, 
then it is to the soul that the resurrection call 
is spoken. Paul expected to hear that call, a 
call to be forever with the Lord and to obey 
it, not in the material or earthly body, which 
was planted in the grave, for he says most 
emphatically (II. Cor. 15: 37) that that is not 

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the body that shall be, but we shall be clothed 
(II. Cor. 5) with our spiritual, our celestial 
bodies. 

But if man is nothing but his body that 
may be dissolved in the grave, vaporized in 
the crematory, taken up into the substance 
of plants or digested and assimilated in the 
bodies of fishes, beasts of prey, and cannibals, 
then to expect a continuity of our present 
personal life with any life beyond death is to 
dream the impossible. For if all that consti- 
tutes a man now be reduced to the atoms of 
carbon, nitrogen, lime, phosphorus, etc., of 
which his body is composed, and then God 
should in after ages reassemble these same 
atoms and construct from them a man, such 
man could have no personal interest in the 
man they formerly composed, and would have 
no responsibility and no accountability for 
him, and it never would have been said that 
we should be "judged for the deeds done in" 
our bodies. It doth appear, therefore, that 
we shall not be dependent upon our present 
bodies for the resurrection life. 

Many Christians who have believed in a 
future life and yet held that life is dependent 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

on the body, have been compelled to think that 
as long as the body is thns dissolved the soul's 
life is suspended and conscious future life 
must wait until some remote time when the ele- 
ments of the body, that for ages have been 
scattered and playing their part in other or- 
ganisms, shall be miraculously reassembled 
and reorganized. Belief in this impossibility 
is not required of us nor is there any cause 
for the thought of such a long blank in the 
soul's life, if once we adopt Christ's view of the 
spirit's independence of the body. 

III. WE SHALL BE SOMETHING BETTER. 

Man's mind may be looked at, at present, as 
the servant of the body. It must study and 
direct the exertions that avoid danger and that 
sustain health and comfort for the body; but 
it is not the highest use of our minds to take 
care of our bodies. The needs of our minds 
are more important. The opportunity to 
know, grand as it is, the happiness of being, 
great as it may be here, are only a foretaste, 
they are but the budding blossom, not the 
fruition of what we feel our capacity to be. 
And since we are to be in a state which we 
cannot know yet, it would be contrary to the 

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A Memoir of 

will and plan of God, as revealed in all the 
earth's history hitherto, if that state of fruit- 
age were not a better life than the present can 
be. The noblest minds are seldom contented, 
and never satisfied with all that is gained here. 
There is sufficient ground for confidence, 
not merely that we shall be, hereafter, but also 
that we shall pass to a life of fulfillment that 
is better than this. God's method in creation 
declares it. Each period in the building of 
our planet, and in bringing in the kinds of life 
upon it, has prepared for, and led up to a bet- 
ter, a more glorious period to follow. After 
sowing comes harvest, after blossom comes the 
time of fruit, the latter is the better time 
toward which sowing and blossoming always 
look. This planet, before life came on it, was 
a bare and desolate orb. When verdure cov- 
ered the valleys and hills, and living creatures 
sw r armed in its waters and made vocal its 
woods, then beauty and pleasure were every- 
where. Many years ago a large museum was 
erected in Massachusetts for the sole purpose 
of receiving rocks from the Connecticut valley 
that bore the footprints of ancient animals. 
The rocks of themselves were worthy of no 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

such distinction except for the evidence they 
bore that ages ago, when the substance of the 
rocks was still soft mud, living animals 
walked upon it. So much more interesting 
was the primeval world made after sentient 
creatures came upon it; but of how little in- 
terest after all, and of how little value would 
have been all that is on the planet and all the 
wealth that is stored up in it, if there had 
never been any life here but that of beasts, and 
if there were never to be any beings here to 
transform earth into a home for civilized man, 
who would begin to make it a school for 
growth in knowledge, heroism, virtue, and 
human joys! But in this material world 
human spirits do but make a beginning; here 
is but the budding, not the fruitage that shall 
be. Our bodies had an existence before they 
were born into their present life, but if before 
birth we had possessed full consciousness we 
could not have imagined what are the condi- 
tions and pleasures of that life in light and 
paternal love into which we were to be born. 
Just so it may be that our souls, during this 
bodily life, are preparing to be born out of the 
body into another and still higher life. Our 

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bodies are called images of the parents who 
gave them birth, but they -attain that image 
not before birth, but come to manifest it only 
through future growth. Our souls are images 
of God, they manifest it very faintly in this 
earthly life in the body; they can do it fully 
only after their birth into, and development 
in the higher life. 

IV. WE SHALL BE DIVERSE. 

We may be sure that whatever we shall be, 
we shall not be all alike, but there will be dif- 
ferences as great as the diversities of the deeds 
done and the characters formed by us here in 
the body. See an archer send an arrow at a 
distant hill in the dusk of evening ; it will pass 
out of your sight in the gloaming long before 
it begins its descent, but if you also are an 
archer you can tell from the curve and direc- 
tion in which it rises whether it will reach or 
miss its mark. See a thousand such arrows 
shot and you can tell from the slant of the 
initial curve that some of them will come to 
rest much farther up the hill than others and, 
perchance, may see some that you must know 
will miss the mark altogether. So do men in 
the life that now is give some hint of what 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

shall be their characters and their destiny in 
that which is to come. It is a singular fact, 
but it is no accident, that the two words in 
the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the 
Greek of the New that are translated "sin" in 
our English Bible, meant originally to miss 
the mark. We can find out, friends, if we are 
missing the mark, and we can cheat ourselves, 
too, if we want to. The greedy tradesman who 
beats a rival by lying, the specious hypocrite 
who gets credit for honesty or generosity or 
piety by false pretenses may think he is all 
right; the men who mistake hatred of others 
for love of country, and they who think hatred 
of the persons whose beliefs we do not like is 
zeal for righteousness, may also think they are 
very right, for there may be five hypocrites 
who deceive themselves for every one who, 
with consciousness that he is a cheat, attempts 
to impose on others. But however blind to the 
fact, they are missing the mark all the same. 
The penalties of sin are the inevitable conse- 
quences of sin. The only way to be saved 
from its penalties is to be saved from the sin. 
Remember that our Redeemer is called 
"Savior" because he shall save his people from 

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A Memoir of 

their sins, never from the consequences while 
they choose to sin. And here comes to view one 
reason why it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be — because it is not yet apparent what 
we shall do. Every day we are weaving the 
web of our characters, and character com- 
pleted is final destiny; but it may be that so 
far the pattern is all wrong and we have not 
known it. We must examine, and if our work 
is not according to the pattern, we must cut 
our web out of the loom, throw away all we 
have done, and draw what is left of our life 
into the harness differently, or waste the 
whole web of life and make a failure more or 
less total in our character, and make our 
destiny a disaster more or less awful. It doth 
not yet appear what we shall be, but every day 
we are weaving that which shall finally 
appear. To change the figure, with many of 
the typewriters the writing is invisible while 
the work is being done, but if the right keys 
are touched, the legend will be correct; and 
if wrong keys are touched the writing will be 
false. So every act, every purpose, every 
emotion, stamps its record in God's book of 
remembrance, which is the human soul. What 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

we are, what we shall be. is of infinitely more 
importance than where we shall be, and we 
are sure in all reason that what we shall be 
hereafter is to be the unfolding of what we 
do and what we are here. 

V. WE SHALL BE CONGENIALLY EMPLOYED." 

If what we shall be is that which we have 
become in this life, no less what we sJwll do 
will be that which we have become able to do; 
for the soul being and doing are correlative. 
The growth and development of this life is 
growth of capacities for activity. The^e capa- 
cities are the precious fruitage of time which 
a reasonable God cannot waste in eternity. 

Moreover our activities there will be social 
activities. Man could not have become man 
except in society. Man could not continue to 
live as man except in society. As sure as there 
is heaven, heaven is the associated life of the 
heavenly. The activities of heaven will be 
social participation in social achievements. 
What the enterprises of heaven will be it is 
bold to conjecture, but certainly there go out 



-The notes of this section are particularly imperfect. 

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A Memoir of 

of life millions of children who need nurture, 
millions of the ignorant who need teachers, 
millions of the benighted who, at best, have 
felt after God and truth in the dark, and 
whose possibilities are yet unrealized and 
their capacities unfulfilled. The mere fact of 
liberation from the flesh cannot fulfill in them 
all possibility, so that there will be no* need of 
endeavor by them and for them. We may 
anticipate unlimited opportunity for helpful 
service in their behalf. Moreover, even the 
best developed souls need each other and may 
employ and increase their powers by helpful 
cooperation in pursuit of the highest and most 
inspiring aims. 

Millions, we are forced to believe, go out of 
life with capacities blighted, who have missed 
the mark of the high calling, who refuse noble 
endeavor and would flee from heaven. We 
may doubt whether the will that is the sub- 
stance of all being shall eternally will their 
continuance ; but those whose life is a part of 
the fulfillment of God's will are as eternal as 
his will, and in the activities of the society of 
heaven they continue to be "workers together 
with God/ 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 
VI. WE SHALL BE LIKE HIM. 

Is there not a most significant hint as to 
what we shall be in that the author of our text 
immediately adds, "We know we shall be like 
him, for we shall see him as he is," 

What can this likeness be that is important, 
but likeness to him as spirits, like him in char- 
acter, like him in knowledge, like him in love, 
like him in service, like him in what we enjoy. 
This was the prospect that ravished Paul 
when he said, "The hour of my departure is at 
hand!" 

But is this being like him the prospect and 
the joy for all of us, for all our race? Alas, 
no ; for there are so many of our race that do 
not want to be like him and are not willing to 
fulfill the conditions of seeing him. Jesus is 
the perfect image and revealer of God's in- 
finite unselfishness, compassion, justice, and 
purity. "He that hath seen me," he said to 
Philip, "hath seen the Father" ; but he implies 
that although Philip had been so long a time 
with Jesus, he had never seen him as he is in 
his real character; and elsewhere Jesus says, 
"The pure in heart shall see God." These 
sayings suggest that our text cannot mean 

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A Memoir of 

that we shall become like Jesus because we 
see him as he is, but that we shall be able to 
see him as he is when we shall have become 
like him. The child in the kindergarten, 
in the primary and intermediate school, does 
not know what his father is as a merchant, as 
a man of affairs, as a professional man, or as 
a public official, the boy is not an actual man 
but only a possibility that may become a man ; 
it will be manifested to him what his father is 
only when he has exchanged the boy's imagin- 
ings for a share in his father's interests, re- 
sponsibilities, and satisfactions. Beholding 
with the physical eye is one thing ; perceiving 
by the soul is quite another. The dog that 
trots by the master's side, as they return at 
evening from a hunt, has as bright eyes as the 
master; the brute can see as quickly as the 
man, he can look up into the sky as far, but 
he does not distinguish planets from stars and 
see the latter as suns sailing in fathomless 
depths of space. And the master, too, may see 
without perceiving ; he may see the stars only 
as so many shining dots fast on the solid floor 
of heaven, because his mind has not been 
taught to understand. And one cannot see 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

beauty of character, cannot understand 
purity, unselfishness, love, holiness unless he 
has in himself beginnings of all these and 
sympathy with them. Putting an unprepared 
soul in heaven would not make him see what 
constitutes the glory of heaven. Seeing what 
is in Jesus, seeing what there is in any noble- 
ness of character like seeing what is in music, 
in art, in love, in holiness, depends entirely on 
what we have within us to see with. And 
many pass out of this life so unprepared 
for heaven that they would no more see its 
beauty and no more experience its joy than 
those occasional travelers see the glories of 
art, who stroll chatting through the galleries 
of Dresden and Florence and cast indifferent 
glances at the masterpieces of Titian, Cor- 
regio, and Eaphael, and who come away mis- 
takenly believing that they have seen all that 
is exhibited there. We cannot see heaven 
until we have some of the substance of heaven 
in our own souls, and none of us are heavenlv 
enough to form beforehand an adequate con- 
ception of its beauty, of its life, and of its joy. 
Let us close by further reverting to our text. 
"Beloved, now are we the sons of God." No 

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A Memoir of 

more important truth concerning the nature 
of man can come to our thought than this, 
that we are now children of God; science re- 
veals nothing else about men, history declares 
nothing else concerning men, religion claims 
nothing else for men so significant as this fact 
that they are children of God. 

Now are we his sons. Already we are bid- 
den when we pray to say, "Our Father." In 
the words of Paul and of the Greeks, we are 
"his offspring." Jesus, "the brightness of the 
Father's glory and the express image of his 
person," is the Way and the Life in fullest 
manifestation. That manifestation appeared 
while Jesus lived a man's life, and from that 
manifestation of the light, those who follow 
his way differ only in degree, for now are we 
also the sons of God. It is not necessary to 
salvation that we hold a particular theory of 
the trinity, or of the Son of God in the flesh, 
but it is necessary that we choose and inaugu- 
rate the divine ideal, revealed by his life, 
which makes him our Way, our Truth, our 
Life, and "partakers of the divine nature." 
What is the difference between the tiny ray 
of light that, glinting through the foliage of 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

a shower-moistened tree, warms and illumines 
a single drop upon a leaf, and all the radiance 
that flows out from the sun, illumining the 
depths of space? They are one as the life of 
man and the life of God are one. 

Beloved, now — in so far as we are like Jesus 
— we are sons of God, secure that the will of 
God which sustains us now will sustain us so 
long as we are not violators of his way — but 
becoming more and more conformed to it — 
sure as sons with the Elder Brother to be wel- 
comed to the house of "many mansions" 
"where we may be also." The constancy of a 
Father's love waits to welcome every prodigal 
back, though even waiting love does not com- 
pel the prodigal's return. Jesus said little of 
prodigals that never return, but that little 
speaks of outer darkness in which the prodigal 
who disinherits himself and never returns to 
the Father's way will find himself at last. 
Here, then, is brought to light the eternal life. 
We are one in nature with God, endowed by 
nature with divine life, and heirs of immortal 
blessedness, if only our will and way are one 
with the Way of life, and the Will, that is not 
only the law of life but the very substance and 

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essence of all life. We live as long as he 
wills it. He ordains us to share in his eter- 
nity if we but take the way of sons, which 
in Jesus Christ is manifest. 

Like children looking forward into man- 
hood, we see imperfectly the future. We ask, 
Shall I associate again in glad reunion with 
those whom here I have loved? Shall I become 
that which I have wished and striven to be 
but could not? Shall I rest after years of toil, 
in abundance of peace and fulness of power? 
Shall the capacities which I have trained, be 
wasted, or shall I engage in heavenly enter- 
prises and know heavenly success? "He is 
able to do exceeding abundantly above all that 
we ask or think/' and we are his sons. "Eye 
hath not seen, nor ear heard the things which 
the Father hath prepared." They are prom- 
ised, but we must wait for the fruition before 
we can understand all that the promise means. 

Dear friends, one and all, may we become 
so much like Jesus here that we may, by and 
by, know him as he is. And when our sum- 
mons comes, "Go not like the quarry-slave at 
night scourged to his dungeon," but with 

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Benjamin Francis Hayes 

"No dread, no doubt, unhesitating forth, 
With asking eyes, pure as the bodiless souls 
Whom poet's vision near the central throne, 
Angelically manifest to man, 
So go we forth with smiling, Godward face." 

While friends who grieve will still give thanks 
and have for us congratulations. 



159 



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